Black Makers Month: Don Stanford
Most people take for granted so much of the technology around us. One man who doesn’t is my neighbor and fellow Brown University faculty member Don Stanford. He is the genius that helped transform a small lottery machine builder into the world’s leading lottery machine manufacturer. No small task, considering how much money is transacted through these devices and considering how totally critical it is that they work all the time and maintain very secure transactions. What happens when a machine goes down? Well, GTECH would pay the owner of the machine for all the lost revenue until the machine is fixed! Just think about this for a second. What if Microsoft or ATT paid you every time your computer crashed or a call was dropped. I bet that would cause a transformational reliability improvement in Microsoft or ATT’s products!!
