Member of Research Staff, Xerox Corporation (Retired) Waldport, Ore. William (Bill) Turner grew up in the 1940s and 50s in a small town in rural LincolnCounty, Ore., and completed the first eight grades of school in the same classroom. Since then, he has built an accomplished career and helped establish the roadmap for digital document technologies as a long-time researcher at Xerox Corporation.
Turner got his footings in engineering at Oregon State University, where he earned a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1963. He developed an interest in high-speed digital circuits while working on a project at Oregon State that was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. He was encouraged to pursue further education in computer technology by two influential mentors, Rod Mesecar and Solon Stone.Oregon State provided Turner with a well-rounded education, preparing him for his first profes sional stint at General Electric.
There, he worked on the early development of digital integrated circuits for large mainframe computers. “At Oregon State, we learned a lot about how to build things and came away with an understanding that engineering involved a lot of different and interesting facets. There was economics involved and other dimensions besides just creating things. That prepared me to go into research and development at General Electric’s Computer Department,” he said.After General Electric, Turner continued to build on his successes.
He joined Xerox to help form the Advanced Development Laboratory as part of the new Palo Alto Research Center. During his 27 years there, he worked on device and system research for electronic documents. He also helped to develop technology for printing, x-ray image capture, document scanning, and displays. In 1981, he shared the Kingslake Medal for his work on high-resolution digital image capture. He holds more than 25 patents on semiconductor devices and applications, and was instrumental in advancing new technologies that have shaped global business and personal computing.The industry has changed dramatically during Turner’s decades-long career. He remembers getting his first email address in 1974, and it bears little resemblance to what much of the world uses today. He recalled a time when computers were much larger and less powerful.
“When I first started my career,computers were built out of hundreds and hundreds of transistors on circuit cards, and when I retired, the whole computer was on one chip. And it was a million times more powerful and several million times faster,” he said.Even though technology has evolved rapidly in Turner’s time, his advice for future engineers is timeless: “Learn how things are made so that you can make them yourself.
Learn how software works so you can run them.”In 1998, he retired from Xerox and returned to Oregon, where he established a consulting practice for technology transfer.Turner and his wife Jean live in Waldport, on the Oregon coast. They are involved in many volunteer activities that support local schools and government.
Degrees
- B.S. Electrical Engineering, 1963