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May identified the cause of the alpha particle problem; he didn't "solve" it.
editTim May discovered that it was alpha particles emitted from the packaging of the memory integrated circuits which led to single-bit errors. That discovery led to solutions. The wording in the article misleadingly suggests that he solved the problem merely by that discovery. 2601:1C2:4E02:3020:4146:2231:C4F1:8E76 (talk) 21:51, 23 May 2018 (UTC)
May's extreme racism rated mention in his obituary
editNYT "He often wrote about arming himself and waiting for government agents to show up. After the Cypherpunks faded in the early 2000s, he began expressing racist sentiments to other online groups." - David Gerard (talk) 20:54, 26 December 2018 (UTC)
- With Tim, it was always a challenge to figure out when your leg was being pulled. I do remember one time at a party where Tim talked about the local firing range where he often was in the company of various federal law enforcement agents. He recounted after engaging them in a friendly conversation and watching them fire that they were really good, far above his skill level. Keith Henson (talk) 01:35, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
retirement
edit- He retired in 2003
Hm? When I met him in ~1992, he was said to have retired at age 34, so in 1986. I guess there's nothing stopping anyone from retiring twice. —Tamfang (talk) 07:28, 2 January 2019 (UTC)
Pensfa
editI met Tim in 1985 at a technical lecture of some kind. He introduced me to the Peninsula Science Fiction Association. Arel (my wife) and I attended (and often hosted) those meetings when we were living in the Bay Area. (Pensfa is still active.) SF groups typically have Jewish members. Over many years, I never saw any indications of racism or antisemitism from Tim. (SF groups seldom have Blacks as members but in the cases I knew about, they were always treated with respect--or perhaps just not categorized as different from other SF fans.)
Tim also gave me a tour of Intel's advanced labs. At the time, Tim was supervising an Indian postgrad who had built a scanning electron microscope that could read logic states on a working 386 chip. As they increased the clock speed, the 386 would fail, but it might be a dozen clock cycles for a deep inside failure to propagate to an output pin. This test machine (about the size of a minivan) could compare logic states on the chip metalization and catch the failure deep inside the chip.
Tim was undoubtedly a curmudgeon, or at least he put on a good act. After a conference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hackers_Conference, he wrote the specifications for the anonymous remailer network that was then implemented by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hughes_(cypherpunk) Tim was an incredibly prolific writer (with a sense of humor) who always had something interesting to say. Keith Henson (talk) 07:23, 5 August 2020 (UTC)