I'll let Paul Sheridan of Analog Devices set the stage. "One of the more remarkable capabilities I saw at DAC '99 was Web-based design demonstrated by Genedax during [Intel executive vice president] Paul Otellini's keynote address," Paul wrote. "Essentially, two designers were able to communicate via the Net (voice and video) while they viewed the same design. The owner was temporarily able to enable the other designer to have edit access and subsequently [was able to] regain control of the approved edited design. For multisite projects, this capability has to be a gift. Unfortunately, it was based on Windows and Microsoft's Internet Explorer."

Privately, the Genedax people told me that what they're really selling is engineering design collaboration via the Internet. Fool that I am, I took the bait and arm-twisted them into doing all the http work for my ESNUG archive site, www.DeepChip.com.

And that's how I started down the path to Hell. Hal Alles had tricked me into becoming an EDA "vendor" instead of a user. No, I don't work for Genedax, nor do I sell its stuff. What Hal did to me was far more devious.

It was a lot like using heroin. My first trip was free and quite fun. I could off-load all that pesky ESNUG archive work that I'd been doing by hand all those years. I could even make it searchable. Wheee!

Then my painful EDA comeuppance came.

I announced DeepChip on ESNUG. Instead of the usual EDA horror stories in my e-mail, I started getting complaints about DeepChip. "While on DeepChip, the Back button causes crashes." "Your site loads slow." "Netscape sees your pages as blank." I felt like an EDA field-apps engineer, stuck forwarding DeepChip bugs back to the Genedax home office in the hope that it could fix them.

And it got worse.

Jeff Solomon of Stanford wrote, "You should really hyperlink each letter in each ESNUG post on DeepChip." My gut reaction was, "Well, that's an enhancement request. I'll deal with that eventually, once we get all these bugs fixed . . ." Oh. My. God. How many times had I been told that by an EDA vendor?

I hit rock bottom when I bought a digital camera for the express purpose of putting fun photos on DeepChip, going for fluff over substance. The horror, the horror. I had become the thing I most despised.

Damn you, Hal Alles! Damn you and the Microsoft technology you rode in on!

John Cooley runs the E-mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG), is a Contract ASIC Designer and loves hearing from engineers at jcooley@world.std.com or (508) 429-4357.