A History of Silicon Valley
This biography is an appendix to my book "A History of Silicon Valley"
Biographies
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(Copyright © 2009 Piero Scaruffi)
Gary Hendrix
Gary Hendrix (Texas, 1948?) studied at the University of Texas until 1970 and
then began work on robotics at the same university. In 1973 he was hired by
SRI's Artificial Intelligence group chaired by Charlie Rosen,
a pioneer of perceptron (neural-network) machines
and the brain behind "Shakey the Robot".
In 1978 Rosen and his associates (including Hendrix) started Machine Intelligence Corporation to commercialize SRI's research on vision.
In july 1981 Hendrix resigned from SRI to work full-time at Machine
Intelligence. However, Machine Intelligence decided to spin off the natural-language processing team that Hendrix managed, and Hendrix
opened Symantec in march 1982 in Sunnyvale with funding from
John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins.
Hendrix hired
a group of specialists from Stanford University and SRI and tried to deliver
a database with a natural-language user interface.
In september 1984 Kleiner Perkins arranged a merger between Symantec and
another company they had funded, the start-up formed by Denis Coleman
and Gordon Eubanks of DRI, which was developing a suite of software tools.
In a few months Symantec introduced its first product,
Q&A (Questions and Answers), a database management system for
personal computers with a natural-language user interface.
Symantec went on to specialize in development tools
for software engineers, i.e. software to help build other software.
History of Silicon Valley
| Biographies
| History pages
| Editor
| Correspondence
|