Leonard was a good friend. There are few people in the world I
acknowledge as being brighter than I am, and Leonard was in that set. He
was also a fundamentally "nice guy" (as are most of the really bright
people I know). I always felt that his non-completion of the PhD was a
great loss (mostly, due to the fact that those who could have been his
advisors had all recently moved from CMU to Tartan Laboratories, and
there was no one else who was really an "engineering thesis" advisor
left, and also because he got a great offer from Lucid); his basic work
was astonishing. I had even suggested a title, "A data compression
algorithm that runs in negative time". He had written an accelerator for
screen refresh that took fewer microseconds to eliminate a character
than the operating system took to send it, so the more his algorithm
ran, the less work the OS had to do; hence the "negative time". I still
have one of his custom-modified display terminals, known as the
"Concept-LNZ", in my basement.
 
I had planned to look him up on a recent trip I made to the vicinity of
the Silicon Valley, but when I located him, he called me to tell me that
he was no longer there; he was in fact in retirement at Lake Tahoe, and
was learning to fly helicopters. We talked for a couple hours.
 
A few weeks ago, I was teaching in Sacramento. I saw all these signs
pointing to Lake Tahoe exits, and wondered if it was very far away. So I
called Leonard. While it was more than I could drive after class, he was
planning to come down to the Bay Area over the weekend, and decided to
drive down on Friday. We got together at a Thai restaurant in
Sacramento, and ultimately talked about three or more hours. We went out
to his car and he showed me pictures of his new home, his
helicopter-to-be, him flying a helicopter, and was excited about the
trip he and his instructor were going to take later that weekend to
Alaska. He was his usual enthusiastic self, full of life, excited by the
prospect of new experiences.
 
I'll miss him.
            joseph m. newcomer