Wow, never knew this backstory about Professor Eggers!
It's kinda crazy how often seemingly random events and chance encounters are often the catalyst for major life outcomes. Even more so when they trigger an outcome that hadn't even been considered or "the plan" up to that point.
Playing video games as a kid, and online MUDs as a teen, directly led to my eventual career in software and opportunity to rise out of poverty.
25 years later and my current social circle / work colleagues have no idea I was a poor kid of a single parent living off free school lunches and food stamps.
Still amazes me how little interest there is in CS/tech/software for the average American -- more so for women/minorities. Most kids go through their doctor, vet, firefighter, detective, astronaut, lawyer, ... phases but computers are rarely on the radar.
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On completely different note, as a UW undergrad I fondly remember taking a computer architecture seminar with Prof. Eggers back in 2005.
I was super interested in architecture back then, and had already decided to head to grad school to do research in the area. Even though I had already read most of the papers we covered, it was still great round tabling things and have Eggers chime in with her perspective.
Too bad computer architecture was kinda past it's prime at that point. Took me a few years into grad school + several Intel internships to finally realize that though.
We had a flurry of advancements from CISC, RISC, superscalar, out-of-order execution, SMT/HyperThreading, CMT (eg. Sun's Niagara, later AMD Bulldozer), RAW/Tilera, VLIW/EPIC/Itanium, etc. Then things just sorta stalled. It's 2020 and we're mostly just putting a zillion cores in a die/package each with uarchs that haven't changed much in 10-15 years.
Memory, interconnect, wider SIMD, and (recently) AI focused features are the main topics thesedays. Oh, and low power/mobile...but that's less fun.
Personally pivoted to distributed systems for a few years, and now static analysis/abstract interpretation. All interesting, and a crazy fun career so far. But, kinda miss the alternative timeline where computer architecture was still a rapidly innovating field to build a career in.
I was lucky enough to attend classes by Susan Eggers and Hank Levy in UW's professional master's program back in 2002. Not only amazing researchers but also great teachers.
> Almost immediately after she started to talk, they began to speak up, so she sprayed them with water and they never cut her off again.
No point in responding with pleas to straight up rudeness.