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Steven McGeady is a former
Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
executive best known as a witness in the Microsoft antitrust trial. His notes and testimony contained colorful quotes by Microsoft executives threatening to "cut off Netscape's air supply" and Bill Gates' guess that "this antitrust thing will blow over". Attorney
David Boies David Boies (; born March 11, 1941) is an American lawyer and chairman of the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner LLP. Boies rose to national prominence for three major cases: leading the U.S. federal government's successful prosecution of Microsof ...
said that McGeady's testimony showed him to be "an extremely conscientious, capable and honest witness", while Microsoft portrayed him as someone with an "axe to grind". McGeady left Intel in 2000, but later again gained notoriety for defending his former employee Mike Hawash after his arrest on federal terrorism charges. From its founding in 2002 until its sale in November 2013, he was Chairman of Portland-based healthcare technology firm ShiftWise. He is a member of the
Reed College Reed College is a private liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus in the Eastmoreland neighborhood, with Tudor-Gothic style architecture, and a forested canyon nature preserve at ...
Board of Trustees, the Portland Art Museum Board of Trustees, and the PNCA Board of Governors, and lives in
Portland, Oregon Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the list of cities in Oregon, largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette River, Willamette and Columbia River, Columbia rivers, Portland is ...
.


Early life

Steven McGeady was born in
Baltimore, Maryland Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, and List of United States cities by popula ...
. His father was a manager for
Bethlehem Steel The Bethlehem Steel Corporation was an American steelmaking company headquartered in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. For most of the 20th century, it was one of the world's largest steel producing and shipbuilding companies. At the height of its succe ...
. After high school in Michigan City, Indiana he briefly attended
Purdue University Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and mone ...
. Then in 1976, he enrolled at
Reed College Reed College is a private liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus in the Eastmoreland neighborhood, with Tudor-Gothic style architecture, and a forested canyon nature preserve at ...
in
Portland, Oregon Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the list of cities in Oregon, largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette River, Willamette and Columbia River, Columbia rivers, Portland is ...
. While attending Reed College from 1976 to 1980, he studied Physics and Philosophy but did not graduate. The majority of his time was occupied at the school's computer center where he and friends would experiment with a
Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president un ...
(DEC) PDP-11/70 computer donated by
Howard Vollum Charles Howard Vollum (May 31, 1913 – February 5, 1986) was an American electronics engineer, businessman, and philanthropist in Oregon, United States. He was the co-founder of Tektronix Corporation, and endowed the Vollum Institute. Back ...
, the founder of
Tektronix Tektronix, Inc., historically widely known as Tek, is an American company best known for manufacturing test and measurement devices such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment. Originally an independent ...
. Reed's computer was the first in the Northwest to run the
Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...
operating system, allowing McGeady to become an early developer in that environment. After college, McGeady was a software engineering manager at Ann Arbor Terminals and Oregon based Tektronix. In 1985 he joined Intel, and in 1991 he co-founded the Intel Architecture Labs in Hillsboro. In 1993, he was promoted to a vice president position at the company.


Intel

At the time of his departure in June 2000, McGeady was Vice President of
Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
's New Business Group. During 15 years at Intel, he led a variety of software, marketing, and investment initiatives for Intel, including the
i960 Intel's i960 (or 80960) was a RISC-based microprocessor design that became popular during the early 1990s as an embedded microcontroller. It became a best-selling CPU in that segment, along with the competing AMD 29000. In spite of its success, ...
RISC microprocessor software development, Intel's digital video and multimedia research, Intel's first Internet development group, and a group focused on Internet-based healthcare delivery. McGeady was a co-founder of the Intel Architecture Labs, a research and development group focused on advancing the personal-computer platform. McGeady ran the
software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...
,
multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradit ...
,
data security Data security means protecting digital data, such as those in a database, from destructive forces and from the unwanted actions of unauthorized users, such as a cyberattack or a data breach. Technologies Disk encryption Disk encryption refe ...
, and
Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
programs within this group for most of the 1990s. His group developed Intel's ProShare video-conferencing technology, the
Indeo Indeo Video (commonly known now simply as "Indeo") is a family of audio and video formats and codecs first released in 1992, and designed for real-time video playback on desktop CPUs. While its original version was related to Intel's DVI video s ...
video compression technology, and Intel's Display Control Interface and VxD graphics software, later licensed to Microsoft to form the core of DirectX. His research group worked with the
MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...
,
Xerox PARC PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...
, and other groups, and developed early prototypes of digital video recorders (DVRs), video broadcast servers, and other technologies. As manager of the i960 software development tools team from 1986–1996, McGeady was an early developer and promoter of open-source software, beginning with
Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman (; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to ...
's
GNU GNU () is an extensive collection of free software (383 packages as of January 2022), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operat ...
C compiler and tools. McGeady wrote the i960 target for
GNU Compiler Collection The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is an optimizing compiler produced by the GNU Project supporting various programming languages, hardware architectures and operating systems. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) distributes GCC as free softwar ...
(gcc) and led the team that developed a suite of tools including a globally optimizing, trace-driven optimizer for gcc and the first
GNU Debugger The GNU Debugger (GDB) is a portable debugger that runs on many Unix-like systems and works for many programming languages, including Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, Free Pascal, Fortran, Go, and partially others. History GDB was first written ...
(gdb) port to a remote, stand-alone system. He hired
Cygnus Support Cygnus Solutions, originally Cygnus Support, was founded in 1989 by John Gilmore, Michael Tiemann and David Henkel-Wallace to provide commercial support for free software. Its tagline was: ''Making free software affordable''. For years, employee ...
to integrate those changes into the mainline GNU tools and to improve the tools' ability to deal with many object file formats. McGeady was Vice-President of Intel's Multimedia, Communications, and Internet activities from 1990 through 1996, where he led the development of the first desktop video-compression software for the PC, Intel's early implementations of multimedia network broadcast protocols, the first products to combine television and web pages, online virtual communities, the Java language, and data security infrastructure. As a software engineer and developer, McGeady was often a minority voice at hardware-dominated Intel. In 1996 he was asked by then-CEO Andy Grove to take a job as Grove's assistant and is the only known person to turn the job down. Grove later said that he and Intel would have grasped the importance of the Internet to the company more quickly had McGeady taken the job. McGeady had a less positive relationship with succeeding CEO Craig Barrett, reportedly telling Barrett to "pound sand" when Barrett instructed him not to testify in the Microsoft case.


Microsoft trials

In 1998, McGeady was a witness for the US Department of Justice in the U.S. vs. Microsoft antitrust case, where he testified about
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...
's attempts to control Intel's software efforts as well as their behavior toward Netscape and Sun's Javasoft. He was the only executive from the PC industry to testify for the government. McGeady testified that Microsoft opposed Intel's 1995 work on a new technology called Native Signal Processing, which would have used instructions from Intel's chips, rather than software code from Microsoft, to run multimedia and communications programs more quickly. McGeady testified for the government and against Microsoft despite pressure from inside Intel. Intel's then-COO Craig Barrett instructed McGeady not to cooperate with Department of Justice attorneys, but "He old/nowiki> Barrett to go stuff it". McGeady also claimed in his testimony that
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...
Vice-President Paul Maritz had described, in a meeting at Intel, Microsoft's plan to " embrace, extend, nd/nowiki> extinguish" the
HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaSc ...
standard until it would be incompatible with the Netscape browser. While this term had some currency before his 1998 testimony, this was its first prominent public exposure. Documents presented by the government showed Microsoft was concerned about McGeady: "Steve McGeady remains an issue for us. He is a champion of Java and a believer that the day of bloatware is over", wrote Microsoft VP Paul Maritz in an email to
Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions ...
. "He has more IQ than most eople at Intel/nowiki>". In November 1998, McGeady testified that
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...
leveraged its monopoly power in
Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...
to impede Intel's ability to compete with Microsoft in areas involving system software and influence of OEMs: *''McGeady testified that Microsoft feared competition from Intel's software development'': At an August 2, 1995 meeting Bill Gates allegedly threatened to terminate Windows support for Intel's new microprocessors unless they were able to "get alignment" between Intel and MS on Intel's Internet and communications software programs, and Gates allegedly told Andy Grove to shut down the Intel Architecture Labs, the organization driving Intel's Internet program. *''McGeady testified that Microsoft was upset that Intel "shifting the software boundary" without Microsoft's permission'': IAL's development of Native Signal Processing (NSP) program caused this concern. NSP was a layer of software that interfaced with both the Windows OS and the hardware in order to support real-time audio, real-time video, and 3D graphics. According to McGeady, NSP threatened Microsoft because it was software at the operating system level, while Microsoft believed they "owned software to the metal", (i.e., to the hardware level). (10AM17, 12PM13) Ultimately, Andy Grove admitted that Intel "caved" by retracting NSP. *''Microsoft was concerned about IAL'': Gates allegedly said regarding Intel Architecture Labs: "Having 700 software engineers running around in the industry is an okay thing as long as Microsoft knows what they're doing first". According to McGeady, they did not want to relinquish control over any application interfaces to Intel. To take advantage of multimedia hardware, Intel was writing device drivers that allowed application developers direct control of (e.g.) graphics and video devices. To prevent this Microsoft threatened to continue bad-mouthing IAL's software and to withhold support for Intel's MMX microprocessor. *McGeady testified that Microsoft used its monopoly power in Windows to restrict support for Netscape and Java, and to their plans to compete with Netscape through
predatory pricing Predatory pricing is a pricing strategy, using the method of undercutting on a larger scale, where a dominant firm in an industry will deliberately reduce the prices of a product or service to loss-making levels in the short-term. The aim is th ...
, through the leveraging of their Windows OS monopoly, and through the creation of incompatible HTML standards: **''Netscape'': McGeady testified that Microsoft generally discouraged Intel from working with Netscape, and that Gates allegedly urged Grove to push Intel's internal information technology group away from Netscape's server toward Microsoft's IIS, and stressed that it was "very important" that Intel "NOT ever publicly say they are standardizing on Netscape browsers". McGeady testified to Microsoft's three-prong strategy to defeat Netscape: they allegedly stated that they would "cut off Netscape's air supply" by giving away Internet Explorer for free, preventing Netscape from deriving any revenue from its browser; that Microsoft asserted they would "fight with the OS and the apps arm", meaning they would create dependencies between Windows and the browser that would create advantages for their browser over Netscape's; and MS's professed strategy of "embrace, extend, extinguish", planning to "extend" the HTML standard to the point where it would be incompatible with the Netscape browser. **''Java'': McGeady testified that Microsoft made it clear to Intel that support for Java would be a "show stopper" in Intel's relationship with Microsoft, threatening to terminate cooperation that Intel required for new microprocessors. Microsoft allegedly proposed that Intel help them prevent the Java component model from becoming a de facto standard by developing a Java system incompatible with Sun's, defeating Java's "write once, run anywhere" capabilities, and tying Java to Windows. Microsoft would distribute this Java virtual machine as part of Internet Explorer, a variant of MS's "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy. When Microsoft learned that McGeady's group at Intel had implemented its own Java VM and multimedia class libraries that ran very fast on the Intel architecture, Microsoft became very upset. McGeady testified that Microsoft pressed Intel to stop this work. The DoJ made four major arguments based on McGeady's testimony: #Intel and its software development effort were hampered by Microsoft's bully tactics; #Microsoft used Intel against Netscape in the "Browser Wars"; #McGeady was an expert witness on software standards, innovation and competition; and #McGeady felt Microsoft hampered Java development. Microsoft, in their response to McGeady's testimony, made the point that his testimony contained several pro-Microsoft threads and that Intel practiced similar cross-product subsidization, distributing free Intel Architecture Labs software funded by microprocessor revenues. They also claimed that Microsoft's influence over Intel and its microprocessors was unrelated to the downstream software segment. Cross-examination of McGeady revealed conflicting interpretations of many Microsoft/Intel meetings, differing reasons for Intel's decisions, and for McGeady's anti-Microsoft bias: #Microsoft defended its attempts to coordinate strategy with Intel and tried to dispel the bully image; #Microsoft presented reasons for the discontinuation of Intel's Native Signal Processing initiative; #Microsoft highlighted Intel practices that resemble Microsoft's alleged anti-competitive behavior; #Microsoft defended its Java program; and #Microsoft aggressively attacked McGeady to discredit him as a witness. McGeady's notes suggested that portions of his testimony could be considered embellishments or stories heard in other contexts, and he was frequently forced to suggest that he had a recollection of meetings and conversations superior to that of other Intel officials, as well as Netscape officers. Microsoft revealed Intel documents that painted McGeady as a "prima donna" who was criticized for his department's belligerence toward Microsoft. Microsoft claimed that McGeady's actions suggested that he considered himself above Intel policy and an extra-corporate defender of truth and justice in the Internet world, and McGeady openly suggested that Intel's interference with Microsoft would aid the industry. McGeady admitted leaking confidential information to
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
journalist John Markoff and met with Netscape's Jim Clark to keep Netscape from being complacent about the threat from Microsoft. Documents show McGeady envisioning entrapping Microsoft in an antitrust suit, and later he indirectly volunteered to testify against Microsoft. McGeady was called again to testify in the 2001 remedy phase of the Microsoft trial.


Other activities

During 1996/97, McGeady was a visiting researcher at the
MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...
, pursuing research on emergent and self-organizing behavior in computer networks. During this time he was a keynote speaker at the first Harvard Conference on the Internet and Society. His speech from the event, ''"The Digital Reformation: Freedom, Risk, Responsibility"'' was reprinted in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, and is credited by some as formulating early theories regarding what became
social media Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...
. During 1997 and 1998, McGeady was a member of the
National Research Council National Research Council may refer to: * National Research Council (Canada), sponsoring research and development * National Research Council (Italy), scientific and technological research, Rome * National Research Council (United States), part of ...
Computer Science and Technology Board Committee on Information Systems Trustworthiness, and is a co-author of its book on the subject.


Mike Hawash case

McGeady entered the news again in 2003 because of his defense of his former Intel employee Mike Hawash who was arrested at Intel in early 2003. McGeady organized a defense fund and protested Hawash's 6-week incommunicado detention without charge. Hawash ultimately pleaded guilty to conspiring to aid the
Taliban The Taliban (; ps, طالبان, ṭālibān, lit=students or 'seekers'), which also refers to itself by its state name, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is a Deobandi Islamic fundamentalist, militant Islamist, jihadist, and Pasht ...
in fighting against U.S. forces in
Afghanistan Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,; prs, امارت اسلامی افغانستان is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. Referred to as the Heart of Asia, it is bordere ...
, and received a reduced sentence in the so-called
Portland Seven The Portland Seven was a group of United States, American Islam, Muslims from the Portland, Oregon area arrested in October 2002 as part of an FBI operation attempting to close down a terrorism, terrorist cell. The seven were attempting to join al Q ...
case in exchange for testifying against some of his co-conspirators.


References


External links

* *
McGeady: Microsoft threats killed Intel's multimedia software twice
{{DEFAULTSORT:McGeady, Steven 1957 births Living people American computer programmers Businesspeople from Portland, Oregon Purdue University alumni Reed College alumni Intel people Pacific Northwest College of Art Tektronix people