My career has been made up of a series of unlikely encounters with incredible people I have had the chance to work with. These people make me who I am and I feel they are a part of me…
Dr. David Pensak was one of those exceptional people. Unfortunately I had fallen out of touch with him. I started thinking about him as I was reading a book on AI and thought about where I first learned about AI. It was from David in 1985. I learned tonight that he passed away in 2022.
I worked for Digital Equipment and was an account manager for the DuPont Experimental Station in the mid 1980’s. The X-Station, as it was called, was a special place. It was a beautiful campus of several thousand PhD’s surrounded by barbed wire. I was lucky and they gave me an office on the campus and I got to know a lot of very smart people. The smartest was David Pensak (Dave Cutler had unfortunately left by the time I got there – as I said it was a special place). At the time, David was focused on doing something called Molecular Modeling – using computers to model the behavior of molecules to do chemical and drug analysis and design – something that is common today. Back then, DuPont would buy him $Million computers (he used my employer’s computers) to model molecules and he used AI as an approach to do this. Yes, he was a man well ahead of his time.
We had scheduled to go to lunch on January 28, 1986. At 11:39AM that day the Challenger spaceship exploded killing all 7 crew members. I can not recall our exact conversation, but I do know that there was not a better person to be with at that time.
Here are a couple of videos of him. A weird one about a coffee mug he invented, but covers his life quickly, including talking about playing in a sandbox with Albert Einstein when he was a kid. And a longer one at Microsoft Research where he covers some of his other inventions including in cybersecurity.
He is also the person who told me first about the Turducken. He had cooked one (three?) for Thanksgiving.
Thank you David.