It was a dark and stormy late afternoon as we drove on East Marginal Way past Boeing for the first time. It was late January 1965, and all afternoons in Seattle at that time of year are like that. It would seem foreboding, but it was actually exciting. My wife and I were both 24 years old and had been married 5 months. At Utah State I had just finished the first two courses toward my Ph.D. I had also finished a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Electrical Engineering at University of Wyoming, and had spent a year at Martin Co. (now Martin Marietta) in Denver in a data transmission set design group and on another project having to do with EM pulse simulation and analysis. It was pretty good work and I learned a lot about circuit design and reliability (never having had a formal course in probability . . . who wanted to learn how to draw black balls out of urns?). In our data transmission design group we were given data communications system design specs from somebody somewhere else in the company. I wanted to do what those guys did. Like most young engineers at the time, I had left school for a good paying job in an exciting area of the space program. (They leave school for the same reasons today; the new marriage was not economically compatible with graduate school.) Boeing generously gave us 3 days per diem to find a place to live. (A friend of mine there bought his first house after having seen it once at night in the rain and without his wife; it was to become a mistake, of course.) The work that I would do at Boeing for the next 2 years was called advanced space communications systems design. Through this work and some of the coursework I was going to take part time at University of Washington, I would acquire some of the tools that I would use years later, when some of what I had done at Boeing would come to be called signal processing. What sorts of things? Well, a lot of phase lock loop theory, some coding theory, statistical performance analysis methods, nonlinearity analysis, image coding, speech coding (linear prediction was just in conception at the time), pseudo-random noise andcode generators, communication channel loss budgets, analytic signal (pre-envelope) operations, Wiener optimization methods, antenna gains, and noise figures. Additive noise can linearize nonlinearities. Thank you Boeing for all that and 18 quarter hours at the University of Washington, and more, but after almost 2 years, back to Utah State to finish the doctoral program (my supervisor at Boeing had said, “I thought you were one of that type”). It was 1973 while I was interviewing at Honeywell Marine that the chief engineer referred to their man who did this work as a signal analyst. From that point on that’s what I preferred to call myself, a signal analyst. I had never heard of this particular title before. The same day I visited the Applied Physics Lab at University of Washington. They too had a signal analyst on staff. Signal analysts often held positions as staff engineers, not working on single projects, but acting as in-house consultants to many projects. (I always liked the idea of consulting. It sounded like you knew something others thought might be valuable.) I recall learning two other important things that day. The chief at Honeywell mentioned that most great discoveries were made at poor facilities in an underequipped laboratory. I put that in the same file with something I learned years later, that most work is done by people who don’t feel well. The other important information I picked up was that APL was interested in something called maximum entropy spectral estimation. They were doing acoustic signal processing for the Navy then, and they still do. After returning from Honeywell to the University of Wyoming (I had been teaching there since 1969), I
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Jan 1, 1992
R.L Kirlin 
Open Access