I Came to the US 40 Years Ago Today

Today, I'm going to be a bit self-indulgent. It is the 40th anniversary of when I emigrated from the United Kingdom to the US. I think it was only the third time I'd been to the US. I'd visited in 1979 for a conference and also visited Carver Mead's group at Caltech. He wasn't there, so I never met him then. I also did a couple of things I think of as American. A colleague from Edinburgh was also around, for reasons I forget, so we went to Disneyland. And a bunch of students at Caltech, one of whom would also join VLSI Technology and end up being my boss for a short period, took me to see Star Wars. It had been out for a couple of years by then, even in the UK, but for some reason, I'd never seen it.

My second trip to the US was in 1981. It was basically a tour of several companies to try and find a job. My plan was to work in the US for a couple of years, which would look good on my resume when I returned to the UK and would probably be an adventure. I interviewed with Bell Labs, Digital Equipment (DEC), Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and VLSI Technology. Unlike the bigger companies that moved slowly, VLSI Technology gave me a job offer at the end of the day I interviewed there. I decided to accept. That turned out to be a good decision since the US was entering a recession. The hiring managers at both Intel and HP wanted to hire me, but in the weeks after my interviews, they had hiring freezes.

As I said, today is my 40th anniversary of relocating here. I came on my own (on Pan Am). We had a 2-month-old baby, so the idea was I would get set up here, then return to the UK and bring my wife and baby to join me. VLSI had set me up for a month in Oakwood Garden Apartments at Saratoga and 280 (which are still there, see the pic at the top of this post). I rented a car at San Francisco Airport but finding the apartments was hard in the days of paper maps and unfamiliarity with the area. In fact, all I had to do was drive down 280, and the apartments were right there, but I didn't know that. I did what many Americans did all the time in those days. I pulled into a gas station and asked for directions.

One problem was that my H-1 visa had not yet come through. Luckily, in those days, although it was illegal for me to work with no visa, it was not illegal for the company to hire me. But to be safe, I didn't actually go on payroll until my visa came through, I just got paid a lot of "relocation expenses" (upside: no tax). I don't know what the rules are today, but back then, you were not allowed to change your visa status in the US, so I had to take a day trip to Vancouver, visit the US Consulate to get my visa, and then fly back. Finally, I was legal.

I'd managed to find a house to rent, but it was not available until the first of the month when the current renters moved out. We had a couple of days after our lease on the Oakwood apartment was up, so we crammed into a motel room with a baby in a crib, and all our worldly possessions stacked around the room. I don't recommend doing this!

The rental house was only about a mile from VLSI, so I cycled to work, meaning we only needed one car. Buying an old clunker of a car was its own adventure, as I'm sure many of you have experienced. One thing I'd been advised was to buy it on credit since anyone can get credit to buy a car and it would at least create a credit record, so I did that.

The next problem is that we needed a washing machine and a dryer urgently. Remember, we had a small baby, and babies generate a lot of laundry. But we didn't have enough money to buy anything new, having just paid first and last month's rent plus a security deposit, so we ended up renting them. We would have bought on credit, except we had no credit rating. Despite having had credit cards and even mortgages in the UK, none of that showed up on our non-existent credit record.

About a year later, we bought a house. It cost $110,000. This is one area where I think I was very lucky. I could buy a house on my entry-level engineer's salary. Not entirely entry-level since I had a PhD., but I would be earning twice as much a few years later. My daughter just bought her first house at age 38. My son, the 2-month-old baby, just turned 40, of course, and rents an apartment in New York City (although his mother-in-law owns the entire building, so maybe that's close enough). But I bought my first house in Silicon Valley in my 20s. And here I am in my VLSI Technology T-shirt, dating from the days when we still called it VTI before some other VTI company told us to stop. "VTI...We Tie It All Together". It seems I'm playing with Meccano "with" my son, who appears to have wandered off.

The moment we had a mortgage, every day would bring letters offering me credit cards. A year earlier, that would have been like a gift from heaven. It seems to be a universal truth that it is easiest to get credit or a loan when you don't need it.

We are coming up to July 4th weekend. One memorable event from 40 years ago was that VLSI Technology was doing very well selling ROMs for video game cartridges. We had a communication meeting with the whole company (my badge number was 130, so that was roughly the number of employees). I think this must have been on July 1st or 2nd since the 4th was a Sunday in 1982. Everyone in the company, including me who'd been there less than a week, received an envelope with a crisp new $100 bill. Nice bonus for a week's work!

Another nice bonus was in 1984 when VLSI had a company picnic. There were raffles. I won an all-expenses-paid trip for 2 to the 1984 Olympics, including the opening ceremony (see above). Plus flights, rental car, hotel, and some spending money for meals.

Then, in 1986 my daughter was born, still in the same house.

According to RedFin, the people who bought it off us still own it since the last transaction was in 1986 for $129,000. Today it is worth $1.4M. The main part of the house is behind the tree, so you can really only see the garage door.

We sold that house when we relocated to France to open up VLSI's European R&D center in Sophia Antipolis. We didn't know if we would return to the US, and the economics were not compelling given that we would have to pay a local management company to manage the rental because we clearly couldn't do it ourselves from France.

Here we are in our temporary apartment in France while we found a house to rent.

So in about five years, I got married, had a son, relocated to the US, bought a house, had a daughter, and relocated to France. And there's another 35 years to go until today!

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