Ed Millis

Ed Millis (born March 3, 1929) is an electrical engineer, inventor, and writer, who was involved in the early development of transistors and integrated circuits; he holds 20 patents.
Biography
Edwin Graham Millis was born on March 3, 1929 in Dallas, Texas to Mary Craig and Hugh L. Millis. The youngest of three brothers, Ed developed a high degree of creativity and ingenuity in order to survive. He had a remarkable childhood which included rubber gun fights and the inevitable red welts on the face, roller skating (inside a tiny house), blowing up (small) things and electrocuting the family at the dinner table as they held hands to "say grace". These and his other childhood adventures are described in more detail and writing skill in his childhood autobiography.
He earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Rice University in 1950, and began working at GSI, the predecessor to Texas Instruments. Among other things, he performed field tests with the Navy on submarine detection equipment, allowing him to fly in all sorts of Navy aircraft, including blimps and the famous . In 1954 he was transferred to the Semiconductor Manufacturing group, beginning a remarkable career at the dawn of the semiconductor industry. His first major creation was the Centralized Automatic Tester (CAT) machine, which revolutionized the electrical testing of transistors. A string of other patents and inventions followed, including the Textool ZIP DIP socket, a clever device familiar to every electronics technician and student which allows an IC chip to be easily inserted into a socket with the aid of a locking/unlocking lever. Remarkably, these ubiquitous devices are still in use today, almost 40 years after their introduction in 1970. Millis has worked with and known many of the pioneers of the semiconductor age, including Jack Kilby, winner of the Nobel Prize for inventing the integrated circuit, Jerry Merryman, one of the two co-inventors with Kilby, of the pocket calculator, Mark Shepherd, president of TI, and many others. In his words, his career reached "from the point-contact transistor to the 64-meg DRAM." He was a Texas Instruments Senior Member of the Technical Staff at his retirement.
After retiring from TI in 1989, Millis began writing. His works include autobiographies, biographies, histories, fiction and how-to primers. His most recent book, "Jack St. Clair Kilby: A Man of Few Words", was commissioned for an exhibit at the SMU Meadows Library in 2008
He lives in Dallas, Texas, with his cat, Charlie.
Books and Publications
* Jack St. Clair Kilby: A Man of Few Words (2008) biography ISBN 0-9718402-8-8
* The (Still) Almost Compleat Works of Ed Millis (2007) collection
* (contributing author) (2005) history ISBN 0-87074-502-6
* The Almost Compleat Works of Ed Millis (2003) collection ISBN 0-9718402-5-3
* The Millis Family Everything Book (2003) compilation ISBN 0-9718402-4-5
* One Way To Write Your Personal Story (2002) instruction ISBN 0-9718402-0-2
* TI, the transistor, and me, or, My dis-integrated circuit through Texas Instruments (2000) history ISBN 0-9709463-2-5
* High Voltage, Gunpowder and Mousetraps: The Almost Perfect Childhood of Ed Millis (1999) autobiography
* Technical Paper on the CAT Machine (1959) IRE National Convention
* Punched Cards Sort Transistors (August 7, 1959) article published in Electronics Magazine

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