Charles R. Munnerlyn and Ronald Smith
A career on the cutting edge. At StoryCorps, Charles R. Munnerlyn talks with Aggie roommate and lifelong friend Ronald Smith about his early career, which included work with Intel founder Robert Noyce.
- [Charles] While I was in Port Lavaca and Matagorda Highland, I saved up my leave and went back to A&M to take some course, a math course, and I took it under Professor Kent, Kubert Kent, yes. The cube root of his class would pass. And I made an A.
- [Ronald] That kinda tells ya how smart he is.
- [Charles] So I was planning to go, when we got out, to go to graduate school, and I wanted to study optics and I had taken only one course in optics in physics. So one day I was going through the bulletins outside the head of department's office and there was a bulletin that said Institute of Optics, Rochester, New York. So I called Judy and told her that we were going to go to Rochester, New York. So that was a bit of a change for her. I got out of the service in March and I went to work at a company called LTV Electrosystems in Greenville, and my boss at TI had moved from TI to LTV Electrosystems and he notified me and invited me to come to work there. So I said, yes, but I'm going to school in the fall so I worked there until about September. And then we drove up to Rochester, New York and I remember we got to Buffalo, New York, and it was so cold we had to put on our coats and I think it was 65 degrees. So we got an apartment there from the school and I managed to get through four years.
- [Ronald] And who'd you go to work for after you finished up at the, that was your doctorate that you were working on --
- [Charles] Yes, that was
- [Ronald] in Rochester. Yeah.
- [Charles] My professor said, while I went around interviewing at a lot of companies, my professor said he would match the highest salary I got offered. He wanted to sell the company. They just made lenses, and he wanted to make some products before they sold it because he felt that people would not be interested in just a lens-making company, they wanted to have some products to sell. So one of the products that we built was a automatic eye refractor. Someone came by and said they had a patent from a fellow and wanted to know if we could build this automatic eye refractor. Well I looked at the patent and I didn't think it would work the way it was shown, so I said yes, but as long as we can use our own technology. So we built an automatic eye refractor, and we were bought out by a company in Palo Alto, California. Shortly after we were bought out, we had a visit from the board of directors of the Palo Alto company. And one of the board members was Bob Noyce, who was the founder of Intel. He came to look at our product and we had planned to use a deck computer and he said that he had a device that we oughta look at. So we were one of the first companies ever to use the 4004 microprocessor. We hired a programmer to write the basic programs so we then moved out to Fairport, well we moved to Sunnyville, California a couple years later.