Download PDF Fall Bridge on Engineering a Diverse Future September 25, 2024 Volume 54 Issue 3 Guest edited by Wanda Sigur and Percy Pierre, this issue of The Bridge addresses the issues around sustaining a U.S. engineering workforce that builds on and integrates the talents and ideas of our diverse nation. An Interview with . . . Arlene Harris, president and co-founder, Dyna LLC Wednesday, September 25, 2024 Author: Arlene Harris An Interview with . . . Arlene Harris, president and co-founder, Dyna LLC RONALD LATANISION (RML): Today we’re delighted to welcome Arlene Harris. Arlene, you’re sometimes described as the First Lady of Wireless; you’re in the Wireless Hall of Fame, and you began your career at age 12, operating the switchboard in your dad’s shop. So, Arlene, let’s begin with that early stage of your career. I think our readers would be interested in hearing how that began. ARLENE HARRIS: Well, my dad was an electrician, and I actually started working when I was barely big enough to sit up in a chair and tap on the keyboard of a calculator. In those days, the calculators had dozens of keys, and my job as a six- or seven-year-old was to add up columns in my mother’s ledger while she was keeping books for my dad’s electrical business. He went on to put communications, two-way radios, in his trucks so that he could communicate with his workmen while they were out on the job, keep track of what they needed, and so on. When I was 12 years old, he recruited me to fill a shift on the switchboard. This was a mobile telephone switchboard. That’s how I got roped into becoming a communications person. It turns out that, back then, when I was 12 in the ’60s, I sat on the switchboard overnight. That was my shift. And in order to connect mobile telephone calls back then you had to connect the calls with cords, and you had a speaker up above so you could listen to the phone calls, and you could hear both sides of those phone calls. Separately, you had a gadget called a calculagraph, and as soon as a phone call that you made for a mobile telephone was answered, you would start the clock. In those days in the telephone business, this was called toll ticketing. When the call was over—because you were listening, you knew it was over—they would say “goodbye,” or “over and out” or something clever like that. Then you stopped the clock. Each ticket represented the time of the call and the respective mobile telephone so it could be billed. RML: Your dad must have been way ahead of his time, though. This was really unusual, was it not? MRS. HARRIS: At first he tried to do what he was doing with a ham radio and couldn’t do it, according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules. Ham radio was a hobbyist and consumer kind of thing, where people who had ham radios would talk to each other. But he got a license from the FCC to provide commercial service. He had one license, and so his ace in the hole, which really made him a visionary, was that in the Los Angeles Basin, where this service was provided, he went up to the highest mountain tops, three of them, to put up antennas to provide coverage for that one channel. It was a duplexed channel license. You would talk on one channel and listen on the other one. And some of the radios back then were still push-to-talk, what’s called simplex. When he went up to those mountain tops, he was actually able to cover the San Fernando Valley, which is a big area in Los Angeles. And the other antenna site was up over Orange County, and it looked into the inland empire of Riverside, San Bernadino, part way to Palm Springs. Unlike a lot of those who ended up being his competitors, he was serving a huge area. Now mind you, and this is the key, only one conversation could go on during that time. So when a mobile came on the air and you acknowledged them, they used that spectrum for the entire coverage area as long as their call was up. And it wasn’t automated. It was connected by those cords and the operator. That was me. The other interesting part of my work was that, because I worked graveyard shifts and overnight, I heard fascinating customers. Our business was in South Central LA. It was probably a little before things got so bad with guns and drugs and so on. But it was still a very rough area. We had customers who came in from that area who had business that they were conducting. I could hear their phone calls, so I kind of knew what their businesses were. We had celebrities. And we had tow truck drivers that were picking up big truck rigs that had broken down off the freeways and that sort of thing. From the time I was 12 until I left high school, I was listening to the real-world talk about people’s businesses, about what they did, about how they solved problems, about cheating on their wives—excuse me, but they did—or their husbands. I was listening to celebrities talk. I had a real education before soap operas were really popular and before social media. RML: You were very young. You were in middle school at that point, right? MRS. HARRIS: I was in junior high and high school during that time. RML: But that really made a huge impression on you it appears, because it shaped your whole life, didn’t it? MRS. HARRIS: Back in the ’60s when I was growing up, there were so many things going on. The war in Vietnam had started. When I got out of high school, I went to Honolulu and was with the airlines shipping troops to Vietnam. That was heart wrenching. There were other great things. We landed on the moon. A few years later in the early ’70s, Marty (Martin Cooper), my future husband (unknown to me then), made his first phone call on a cellular phone. During the ’60s and ’70s, there were enormous disruptions, challenges, and conquests going on. Besides having a little bit more street smarts than my contemporaries had, I had a perspective from that time of great turmoil. KYLE GIPSON (KG): Your experience working as a child are both impressive—for a 12-year-old to be doing that kind of work—and also super interesting in terms of the window your work offered you into the world. It seems that your interest in telecommunications goes back to the very beginning. I’m wondering if you could speak a little bit about how the environment you grew up in informed what you went on to do, specifically your entrepreneurial endeavors. How did the environment you grew up in spark your entrepreneurial spirit? In everything that I do, it’s about acknowledging a problem and deciding to focus on solving it. It’s as simple as that. MRS. HARRIS: My father was a true entrepreneur. He had no formal training. But he saw opportunities and how to do things right, or do them with long-range thinking, which obviously helps you as an entrepreneur. I didn’t have kids when I was young, so I didn’t get distracted, not that I planned it that way. That’s just how it happened. I was able to go through my career, starting with the most important part in my technical career foundation, working a few years with the airlines. I was working for the airlines during their scale up for wide-bodied airplanes. That one development of a bigger airplane caused disruption across the entire airline industry. I was, for a time, right in the middle of that. We had to scale up the airports. We had to scale up the reservations office. We had to put different kinds of facilities for moving baggage and checking people in at the airports. It was a scale up of the entire previous experience of traveling. And what scaling up meant was automation. So I learned about automation in the late ’60s. If you can imagine this—when I lived in Honolulu and my roommate was in LA on temporary duty—we were sending messages back and forth by computer by creating records on the reservation systems for six months out and then using the remarks section to talk to each other. That was a precursor to email. We had a dialogue going every day: Could you pick up my dry cleaning? Or, I think I’m going to come back tomorrow. Or, I’ll be on this flight, can you pick me up? We were having that kind of dialogue by using a workaround, as engineers would say, to communicate with each other. Those things were made available because of connectivity. All of the work that I did when I was with the airlines was organizational. I was doing user interface and experience work to get data into a format that reservations, ticketing, and all of the people on the computer system could use to find out things about what was going on in the rest of the network. There’s a long list of the schedule-related things that I worked on, including reserving space for pets on airplanes and reporting snow conditions at ski resorts, the meals that were being served on flights from LA to Honolulu, and the fares between here and there. We also did testing for the new automated ticketing programs that were created to support the wide-bodied airplanes, because you couldn’t bring 300 people into the airport and only have half of them ticketed and get the plane off on time. I would see what the consumers were seeing, and I’d be frustrated with implementations that didn’t take into account the needs of whole segments of our society. RML: You know, Arlene, what I find really amazing about all of this is that you’ve learned all of the skills that you are talking about on the job. You did not go to college, is that right? MRS. HARRIS: Right. RML: So you were self-taught? How did you become so skilled that you could make the airline changes that you’re describing? MRS. HARRIS: You have to remember that this was the late ’60s. Nobody was trained to do these things. There were also very few companies building automation equipment. DEC was stepping in. I think HP was too. IBM was into it because they built all the big airline systems. And IBM built a good deal of what was then used in the government. The government and the airlines were the biggest users of computers. There were no servers like we have now. The computers were huge, not what we think of today. And there were no personal computers. In fact, “computer” was a word that people only had a vague idea of back in the late ’60s and early ’70s. So getting trained to do the work I did and the work that all of my colleagues did, including some of the people who were in the tech area keeping our reservations and systems running, was all OJT, on the job training. You learned by osmosis. I started doing teletype. I pushed Hollerith cards into a crunching machine to adjust seat inventories for Air Canada, and all of this was well before anybody even knew what the potential of computers was. RML: Did you make a conscious decision not to go to college? Could you see a path forward without having to go to college? Did that enter your mind as you were doing all this? MRS. HARRIS: The interesting thing is that I didn’t make a conscious decision not to go to college. I was never college material. Not because I wasn’t smart and not because I couldn’t solve problems and do things. But I couldn’t read well. I couldn’t read appropriately to be in a college program. During grammar school I was always in remedial reading. By the time I got to the seventh grade, that’s about the fastest reading and comprehension that I could do. Even today, when I read, my comprehension and my ability to read come from my being able to see words and say them in my head to understand what they mean. All throughout school I never got a diagnosis of reading disorder. So I just avoided any classes that required lots of reading. The other thing is that I kind of had a misspent youth. I got very interested in cars, and I was very involved in racing my car. I had a car because my dad paid me $1.05 an hour when I started working on the switchboard. By the time I was 15, I bought my own car. And it was a good thing I did because my folks would have to drive me to work. When I got my car they didn’t have to drive me to work anymore. In my neighborhood, where my family’s business was, it was very rough, so I had to carry a gun. I carried a gun under the seat of my car. Not that I ever used it. I had a little bit of shooting training but it was one of those things that’s like, don’t mess with me. And I learned how to drive defensively in my neighborhood, especially at midnight when there was a lot going on. RML: Your beginnings are truly remarkable. MRS. HARRIS: It’s a little different than the classic “junior high, high school, college, career.” I had a different experience. RML: But you’ve made such a huge difference, not only technologically but also in the lives of many people. You seem to focus your attention on helping people. I look at the Jitterbug phone, for example. How did that come about? What inspired you to create the Jitterbug? MRS. HARRIS: In everything that I do, it’s about acknowledging a problem and deciding to focus on solving it. It’s as simple as that. I had friends who were working on creating a one-button safety phone, just for older people. My friends failed because they couldn’t get financed. But in any case, this problem was something that was introduced to me. It wasn’t anything I saw. Then the thing that really got my juices flowing was that my parents had problems using cell phones. Here’s my dad, who ran this big mobile telephone network in Los Angeles, and he couldn’t use a cellular phone at the time. This made the problem personal; I was hoping to make something for my parents. They lived out in the country. They would drive their car along the dark highway and not have any communications, and by then I thought, this is just not right. So I worked on solving that problem. And there were a lot of speed bumps that I ran into as I was getting going, including financing for me as well. We had to figure out how to get on the networks, and the politics at the networks would not allow us on. We figured out a workaround, and it was a very clever workaround. I worked with some very clever guys. We talked about how we were going to do this, probably driven by their insights more than mine. But the key was that if you were to get on the network the way we were proposing to get on, the carriers could just cut you off. And of course, it’s very risky to get consumers into a service with the risk getting turned off. I guess because of what I lived through, I’d never been risk averse. I decided: We’re going to do this, and if the carriers try to cut us off, I am going to make a very big stink about it at the FCC (where they got their licenses). So we went ahead and did it, and ultimately we were able to get financing and really roll out the Jitterbug program. RML: Why did you call it the Jitterbug? What was the origin of that name? MRS. HARRIS: We had had a previous service called SOS that was primarily a safety-oriented service for seniors. We did have college kids use them when they drove long distances to school, but the primary adopters were seniors. We got into a partnership with Samsung. Marty helped me do that. We knew that seniors were our primary target customers. And the issue was that we needed to pick a brand that would be meaningful to them, so we made a list of the characteristics that we wanted in the name of our product. It turned out that in the cellular business there weren’t many good names left by the time we named Jitterbug. But Jitterbug had energy and seniors’ recognition and we were able to brand it and get our trademark and our service mark. That’s how the name came about. The fact that we’ve got so many choices makes what we do very confusing. The Jitterbug is a flip phone with big buttons and so on. Later on in the company, when I wasn’t involved in making decisions, they brought out a smart phone named Jitterbug 2. Had I been in a place to decide how to name it, it would have been named Rock and Roll. Not Jitterbug 2. Because it’s a different market serving the new older people, not the older, older people. KG: I love the name Jitterbug and also the idea of naming a smart phone Rock and Roll. I’d like to zoom out a little bit and go back to Ron’s comment that you have been described as a serial entrepreneur, given that you’ve been influential across a number of different areas over the course of your career. I’m wondering if you could, taking a bird’s eye view of your career, say a little bit about what you consider to be the throughline. Is there one thing that you’ve been working on or towards over the course of your entire career? MRS. HARRIS: Marty and I have been approached for years about different opportunities that people want our help with, or they want to be advised or want to get investment or some help from us in one way or another. Unless it’s solving a real problem, we’re not interested. Most of the things that I do are rethinking solutions to old problems. Or taking something and combining it in a different way to come out with a fresh solution that others were either unwilling to do or just never thought about doing. I have a lot of systems training going back to the early ’70s. I had to learn systems that my guys were building. I had to sit with them and learn how they worked. I used to be able to think about the mobile and wireless networks and know exactly what was going on. That’s not the case anymore. I’m yesterday’s expert. But what I do know is that it doesn’t take fundamental research on and development of new things to find ways to make life better and solve problems for people who really need solutions today. So that’s kind of been a thread in the things that I thought about doing. It has always been problem-solving. Let’s figure out how to fix this. I guess the other thing is that I’ve had careers in both fixing problems for industry and for consumers. I fixed problems for industry when I was in the billing and customer relationship management systems, the roaming systems, which I was very much involved with designing. So those things are necessary to make services work. And then there’s what is necessary to make consumers enjoy what these systems can deliver. The delivery part is what I focused on later in my career. I would see what the consumers were seeing, and I’d be frustrated with implementations that didn’t take into account the needs of whole segments of our society. Today, the problem, as I see it, is that technology has advanced so much, the adoption by young kids has become pervasive, and we’ve allowed the technology community to consolidate their power over all of us. Today, I’m very focused on things like privacy, specifically data privacy. We funded a program called the Internet Safety Lab. And I’m still working on trying to restart a company that I spun up and then had to spin down during the pandemic. So that’s another effort. With that effort, we’re trying to solve problems for families who have loads of tangible media, all of their old photographs and papers and so on, that really need to be digitized. We want to make that easy and reliable for them. We started that business but we couldn’t test our products during the pandemic. I’m hopeful to start it back up again. But again, it’s for families. Now, industry is not my focus. RML: Is what you just described an outgrowth of Dyna, the startup that you and Marty initiated, and the incubator phenomenon that you are interested in? MRS. HARRIS: We did start it at Dyna, which is just our business anchor. It’s an LLC and we’ve done consulting from it. We’ve started businesses from there. We’ve been involved with other companies. Dyna is our home base. We have been involved in starting and helping companies from that home base. RML: That’s what I was wondering. So you actually do provide an incubator for startup companies that come to you with requests for help. Is that right? MS. HARRIS: Well, we don’t finance others within Dyna. The projects that we’ve funded in Dyna are primarily the things that are our ideas. And when we help folks who come to us, typically we consult with them from our Dyna entity. It’s just a way to separate our business life from our personal life. RML: To shift gears a little, in an interview that I read you pointed out that, for a long time, people could not see the benefits of wireless technologies, and, in fact, some people looked at the technology as being more of a leash than a social benefit. Do you still feel that way? When you look at, for example, the influence that cell phones have had on kids and so on, what do you think about that? Are the social benefits of cell phones still there, or have they been curtailed in some respects by the harm cell phones are doing to kids? MRS. HARRIS: Well, the issue of technology being a leash is no longer an issue. It used to be that if you had a cell phone or if you had a beeper, before cell phones, a lot of people felt like they were being leashed because others could find them—they would have to react. Today, the problem, as I see it, is that technology has advanced so much, the adoption by young kids has become pervasive, and we’ve allowed the technology community to consolidate their power over all of us. When I say we’ve allowed it, that’s what’s happened. And, consequently, things that we used to think were sacrosanct aren’t anymore. For example, with social media, before the advent of mobile telephony and computer services, if you were a broadcaster, the FCC had rules about how many markets you could be in. The FCC kept media people from having a monopoly influence over people’s minds by putting up radio and newspapers in every market. Well, then you’ve got Apple and Google. Apple, Google, and a few others are now the dominant access to global markets. They don’t have any restrictions on what gets published. Those who distribute information on the internet are not under any real guidelines about what they can do or where they can do it. And so they’ve got effectively a global footprint, not just seven or eight markets that a publisher could have in the United States 20 to 30 years ago, but an entire world market. That has changed how we should be thinking about what these systems should do and how they should behave. By the way, I’ve never been a parent, but Marty and I have some grandchildren. And the fact is that parents have such a hard time managing the influences on their children today. When we were kids we’d go out on our bicycle and maybe get in trouble. But now, kids can sit in their bedrooms at night and get in trouble. My hope is that there will come a layer in the network that, if I have a device, this layer will be there to protect what goes on and how my device serves me, and the rest of the world has to go through my filter, and parents would have the ability to manage that filter for their kids. Hopefully we will get to the level where we have our own personal AIs that are aware that someone is underage and that there needs to be some supervision, and that the things that come into your view are then curated by your personal AI. It’s a very difficult thing to do. What I’m investigating now is whether our operating system people and our chip makers are needed to do what is needed to get to that level—essentially, splitting up what comes through cell phones into curated and protected services. RML: I think that’s a very interesting idea. What prompted my question was the recent interest on the part of the US Senate and Congress in terms of banning TikTok, and that’s partly to do with the Chinese government’s influence but also the impact TikTok has on young kids everywhere. Your approach might be a far better one. MRS. HARRIS: A lot of people have said that we are no longer in control, and we never will be again. There’s been a transformation in industry, and we’ve all been sucked up into that. They’ve done wonderful innovative things for their companies and us while in recent years invaded our privacy and unleashed terrible influences without concern for the unintended consequences, and here we are. The thing is that we’ve been involved with and concerned about data privacy for a long time. We’ve got a lot of people saying privacy is gone and we’ll never get it back. Well, my feeling is that if we did the right thing to get privacy back, it would only take a few years, and information that was taken from us five years ago would be stale. So we could just stop that flow and make sure that going forward we have good guardrails, including on what AI is going to do for us and to us. RML: There’s so much concern about AI in the context of potential negative effects on our society but what you’re suggesting is actually a very useful approach. MRS. HARRIS: Well, it’s a thought. The networks have become so complex in the way they interface and all of the protocol—everything that has to work together just to make products. It’s almost impossible today to make anything that will get any reasonable adoption or have a business plan where you can raise money. It’s almost impossible to do that without having to deal with these big monsters. Because everybody’s carrying an Android or an Apple phone, you’re kind of stuck. If you’re building software for people who carry these devices, you’re just going to have to put up with it until there’re ways to do things differently. Problem-solving by going on a bench and making something or coding something for a system as an individual isn’t going to be enough for the big problems that we’ve created. Our systems have simply become too complicated. KG: One thing that I am picking up on here in our conversation, and also in thinking about all of your accomplishments, is your ability to think from the perspective of consumers. You have an interest in user friendliness, protecting people’s privacy, and solving problems for consumers. How would you assess the state of user friendliness or accessibility as far as technology goes today? MRS. HARRIS: Some people have impairments, let’s say. They’re not necessarily old. They have impairments. Unless devices are made purposeful and branded for them, if you go to the mainstream mass market, you will not find user experiences that work for them. Period. It’s just the way it is. So you have to almost brand for that market and focus on a problem to get it solved. Think about the fact that we’ve got all of these platforms that we work on. I have five big platforms that I work on and then other software that I work on when I’m involved with a project—say a nonprofit. I’ve got to adopt their selection of tools to be able to look at their reports. The fact that we’ve got so many choices makes what we do very confusing. What I believe has been needed in the market are stores that are curated for a purpose. And we need to be able to give whole segments of the community ways to get at things that are purposely made for a specific market. Now, that means you do have to adopt some of the demographic sort of standards or things that people believe are pretty typical of a particular market. It doesn’t mean you can’t go to other stores. For example, you could have a curated app market for seniors, people who are 80 plus, or for kids, who are under 10. It’s not perfect but it’s possible to have things broken down where there are other people that are actually doing the tests and looking at how consumers behave and saying that this product should not be marketed to these people. In fact, I think things have gotten worse. All of these systems that don’t play nice with each other because they’re trying to own the customers, their contacts, their photos, or this or that. I really dislike that a lot. RML: I’m just curious, you really have a remarkable history and sense of perspective. Do you share that with other young people? Do you meet with young people and talk about these things? MRS. HARRIS: I do. I’ve had many interviews much like this. Yours has been fun. Every time I do this it makes me think of things I haven’t thought about. Sometimes people ask me to tell them some of the things that I would advise other people. There’s so much distraction in trying to do things today that it makes it hard for people to focus. And so you have to pick which thing you’re going to do. And in my case, today I’m not nearly as busy as I was because I spun down my startup two years ago, and I’m in the process of figuring out how to spin it back up so that’s a work in progress. But you also have other things people ask about—you know, family issues when you’re an entrepreneur. I can say that my mom, when I was growing up, often got a lot dumped on her because my dad was focused (and I learned that focus). And so when you’ve got family needs, you have to integrate that thinking into what you can do. Between some health problems in our family and the pandemic, I would say that it’s one of the least active times in my life. And that includes getting out and talking to kids. We do that, Marty and I both. In fact, he’s really good at it. He loves talking to kids. So we do that but I haven’t made it a focus like he has. RML: I hope that many people, especially some of our younger members, will read this conversation and feel the same way I do: The things you’ve done are quite astonishing. You see opportunities and you know how to address them. And you’ve done that sequentially with a whole range of things. MRS. HARRIS: There are two things that I credit that to. First, I can’t read very well, so I never got buried in an individual discipline like engineering. I had to look across and consolidate my views into pretty principles. Second, I listened to all those phone calls when I was young. I listened to people talk about what they were doing, solving big problems, and making trouble. It was educational. RML: I’m always curious about the way nature treats us all, and here you’re describing a situation where reading is difficult for you, but you have such clarity of vision when it comes to other things. You can see a need and you can respond to it. It’s a different form of reading. It’s not reading text. It’s reading society. Or reading our culture. And that’s an incredibly valuable capacity. MRS. HARRIS: That’s why I think that, going forward, many of the pressing problems in the world are going to be solved by teams of people. They’ll be cognitive scientists and designers. Engineers who need to embrace each other’s work. Because problem-solving by going on a bench and making something or coding something for a system as an individual isn’t going to be enough for the big problems that we’ve created. Our systems have simply become too complicated. RML: That’s a good note on which to close. I’ve enjoyed this enormously, Arlene. Thank you for being with us today. MRS. HARRIS: I appreciate it. You’ve drummed up some of my old memories. KG: I echo what Ron said. This has been a super inspiring conversation, and I have no doubt that it will be inspiring for our readers as well. About the Author:Arlene Harris is president and co-founder, Dyna LLC