Jack Kilby....A tribute to a great mind

Jack Kilby........A tribute to a great mind

There are not many who contributed more to our modern society than Jack Kilby. If you are unaware, Jack invented the integrated circuit.

Kilby constructed a prototype of the integrated circuit in September, 1958. It was a silver sliver (a chip, you might say) of germanium with wires sticking out of it, glued to a glass slide about the size of a thumbnail.

Kilby died in 2005 in a world where microchips permeate every aspect of our daily life, from the inner space of our bodies to the outer space of the cosmos, at home, at play and on the job, in our cars, in our ears ... indispensable.

I had the pleasure of meeting Jack Kilby at an awards banquet in Dallas a few years before he passed away. My old friend Ray Chapman, Uncle Ray to most that know him, was being honored for his contribution to the EWaste or electronic waste recycling industry. Ray basically invented electronics recycling as we know it today, as far as I know. Anyway, Jack Kilby had made a presentation at the banquet and came off the podium to shake some hands and talk to the folks attending. Ray had a new digital camera, remember we are talking 1992 or thereabouts, so I talked him into letting me use it to get a shot of me shaking the hand of the great man, Kilby.

We got it all cued up for my picture with one of my heroes, and the camera wouldn't work! After a few tries with no success, Mr. Kilby said in his low and slow southern drawl..."prolly neeeeds a baaaattery". Now what do you think was going through the mind of this genius when he came to this simple conclusion?

The Importance of Recycling in Today’s World, MTBC Newsletter April 2009

The Importance of Recycling in Today’s World, MTBC Newsletter April 2009

Did you know tons of electronic equipment is being dumped on a daily basis and handled improperly causing many, many risks? Stored data on these computers can be recovered by someone else, not to mention the extremely toxic affect on the environment once in the earth’s surface. The majority of hard drives contain recoverable data including company financials, credit card numbers, medical records, and sensitive e-mails. There are hundreds of millions of obsolete computers in the U.S. today. Old technology is the fastest growing refuse problem in the world with an annual growth rate of 3 to5 percent. Do we want to be knee deep in monitors and circuit boards?
One of the trends causing a terrible hazard condition for the earth is third world dumping. Countries like Asia and Africa do not have the infrastructure to handle used, recycled electronics. There, labor is cheap and environmental regulations are lax. Electronics are dumped in a hazardous manner causing severe pollution, spoiled drinking water and grave health problems. Did you know that landfills are a major source of methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas?
Does your company want the public embarrassment of not complying? How about the threat of expensive litigation for non-compliance? Today, companies can face hefty fines and lawsuits as a result of new e-waste regulations. And numerous new bills are already in the works through legislation. Municipalities are now taking the lead to stem a costly and polluting deluge of high-tech trash. Mandatory state-wide solutions such as “producer take-back” initiatives that hold manufacturers financially responsible for disposing their electronic products once they are worn out are on the rise.
The best product lifecycle management programs re-purpose end-of-life, surplus and obsolete electronic components back to operation for reuse while observing proprietary concerns of the manufacturers. To extend the lifetime of a product is the best way to save energy and keep our landfills clean. Companies need a critical supply chain partner that is certified and meets the particular needs of its customers.
What is considered e-waste? It includes computer processing units, monitors, televisions, printers, scanners, copy and fax machines, phones and electronic game units. Putting these products into the wrong hands - such as low-wage workers in third world countries can mean unsafe handling of the toxic materials that can spell disaster. Restrictions on the use of potentially hazardous materials, such as lead, in electronic products are spreading worldwide. In response, electronics manufacturers have had to spend substantial time, effort and money to prepare to comply with applicable legislation.Granted, the cost of recycling these products is a very expensive proposition. But for instance, computer-maker Dell recently bowed to formally support producer take-back legislation nationwide after aggressive pressure from environmental groups. By 2009, Dell expects to have taken back 275 million pounds of its product, according to a company spokesman. So the recycling business is going to keep growing by leaps and bounds. Worldwide, the e-waste and e-recycling market will grow from$21.8 billion in 2006 and reach $30.2 billion in 2008.
Recycled cell phones are playing a critical role in the spread of wireless communications across the developing world, where land lines can be costly or unavailable. There is a rapidly increasing global market for refurbished cellphones with more than 2 billion subscribers in the world. With Americans trading in their phones for fancier models every 18 months on average, the supply of used but perfectly functional phones is enormous. Recyclers find about 60% of the phones that come in are reusable and the rest are used for parts or material recovery.
So if we are diligent and creative with recycled products, it will have an enormous healthy benefit on the earth and all mankind for future years. Companies need to make plans now to take care of the situation before stricter laws and expensive costs catch up with them. They should team up with a certified partner that recycles all types of commercial electronic equipment and material, including all information technology and telecommunications infrastructure, mainframes, PCs, switches, routers, interactive voice response units, automatic call distributors, monitors, printers, fax machines, modems, cellular phones, board level components and various other types of plastic and metal. Going green will soon no longer just merely be a choice. It will be a mandatory responsibility for every company.
BCD Electro is a technology recycling solutions provider employing environmentally sensitive methods for recycling technology equipment, integrated circuits and electronic components to meet the needs of businesses. As an ISO 9001 and 14001 certified company, we have created product lifecycle management programs specializing in re-use and re-distribution since 1979. BCD Electro’s focus is repurposing end-of-life products, surplus and obsolete electronic components back to operations for reuse, remarketing electronic components to generate extra revenue and recycling electronic components into new product. For more information on how your company is complying and what resources are available to you, please contact Bob Harris at bharris@bcdelectro.,com, or 214 630 4298 .Bob Harris, PresidentBCD ElectroDallas TX

A little history

BCD Electro was founded in 1979 by Bob Harris Sr. on a card table in my parent’s living room. The original name was BCD Radio Parts Co., and was created to serve the amateur radio community. Dallas had an electronics flea market known as 1st Saturday that was held in the downtown area that was the primary source of income at first. BCD then went on the road to other electronic s flea markets around the country. I was traveling to 30 of these events per year at the peak of this era of the company. The “Big One” was in Dayton OH. And was a three day marathon of ham radio enthusiasts haggling over spending $.25 on a connector that cost $3.75 out of franchised distribution. There were thousands in attendance and the Dayton Hamvention is still going.
About 1981 I joined my mother and father in the BCD business after a stint in Dallas and later Austin in the music biz as a guitar maker and repair person, wow those were some fun times I wouldn’t trade for anything, but I was a single father and really needed to start making some money. We had a mail order catalog then also that a good friend in the business let us use (thanks Billy). My Dad left the business in 1987 after finding a new interest in estate jewelry and I moved the catalog from a paste up to electronic version via Pagemaker software. This was a 6 month long process of many 12 and 14 hour days on a 20 MHz 286 computer. We put out about a half a dozen of those catalogs, and at first, they would bring a lot of orders, but after a couple of years the orders were dropping quite precipitously. Ham radio was moving away from the do-it-yourselfer to the you-can-buy-it-cheaper-than-you-can-build-it-er.
We abandoned the catalog business and auctioned the catalog inventory to begin buying and selling excess and surplus electronic components, mainly semiconductor materials. There was always the “what the %#@ is this” aspect of this, especially when we were working with TI missiles and aerospace from the old county store in the main TI plant at Central and IH 635. This kept things interesting and challenging as there was always something new to sell and/or recycle. The recycling aspect of the business was always there in the EOL and the yet to be coined PLM (product lifecycle management) business.
BCD has now moved the recycling aspect of the business to a more prominent position in the company with all the greens, RoHs and WEEEs that have emerged in the last few years. We are working with hospitals for medical equipment, as well as many other types of businesses for environmentally sound disposal of IT, networking telecomm and other industrial electronics. We are keeping disk drive data from leaking into the hands of data pirates by destruction and erasing to military specifications.
Semiconductor sales is still our main income and specialty.

RoHS/WEEE

Many independant distributors are struggling with how to juggle stock levels of non RoHS compliant parts. I think there will be a shortage of both compliant and non compliant parts. Emphasis on compliant as it was with the surface mount transition. I stocked a lot of through hole IC's and did OK, but the surface mount shortage was a real windfall for BCD Electro and most of the other independent distributors I know that were operating back then... was it 90-91?

As far a s WEEE is concerned, this is an opportunity for companies that have backgrounds in surplus and excess inventory management. PLM is the new term and is much more sophisticated than we were just a few years ago. Very interesting times.

We are looking for the governing powers to come up with a set of rules for recycling so companies can follow them. The European initiatives RoHS and WEEE are still trying to set up a set of rules also. OK so this is a whiney blog but I just wanted to see what others are saying. Yes I am in the electronic recycling business. CA., ME. and a few other states have passed laws governing e-recycling, so far as I know the laws are not settling on a common guideline for the US. This is trouble in the long run as material is transported and having to comply with different laws as state lines are crossed.

Recycling electronics in Texas

We are looking for the governing powers to come up with a set of rules for recycling so companies can follow them. The European initiatives RoHS and WEEE are still trying to set up a set of rules also. OK so this is a whiney blog but I just wanted to see what others are saying. Yes I am in the electronic recycling business. CA., ME. and a few other states have passed laws gonerning e-recycling, so far as I know the laws are not settling on a common guideline for the US. This is trouble in the long run as material is transported and having to comply with different laws as state lines are crossed.