While going the College Interview process at San Jose State, he was told by the Hewlett-Packard representative, "You don't have what it takes. Get a job at Marriott's Great America. But I'll be a nice guy and submit your resume into our personnel department anyhow...."
Mark managed to get job at American Microsystems Inc. where for 7 years he designed several hundred gate arrays for customers, the first three years of that time spent enduring the ritual 6 month cycle of receiving yet another reject letter from Hewlett-Packard saying "We're sorry, we still can't find a place for you in our organization, but we will keep trying...." This despite the fact that one of the gate arrays Mark designed at AMI was used in one of Hewlett-Packard's first color printers ever sold.
Well, after that, life was all down hill as Mark moved on first to a small startup where he encoded "place and route" data bases for laser programable gate arrays as well as writing the programs used to extract the laser cutting coordinates from these data bases. This was followed up by 8 years of further failure at Sun Microsystems where he designed three of the chips used in the SPARCstation 1, one chip and all of the system simulation for the SPARCstation 2, designed the CPU boards and was lead engineer on the SPARCstation IPX, SPARCstation IPC and the SPARCstation Voyager.
Mark joined FirmWorks in May, 1995 and has continued his career of unending non-performance by creating an Open Firwmare "superdriver" for VGA cards that don't contain internal FCode drivers. At last count, the superdriver is able to drive any of over 30 popular VGA cards.
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