I have talked to Mr. Fancy Pants! (Patreon)

I had a nice Zoom conference with Bob, the one and only "Mr. Fancy Pants". From the picture, one would expect a flashy personality, but he is in fact a straight talking and serious engineer, even a bit stern. He could rattle off the HP number of every instrument in the rack he is sitting in front of in the picture, and what each did. 

For his first job, he wrote all the software to control this RF test rack, which happens to be a radio tester. He explained that this was one of the very first automated test systems using the newfangled HP-IB bus (still with us today under the GPIB moniker), and that it used almost every instrument that had HP-IB capability at the time.

He fondly recalled how powerful the HPL language of the HP 9825 was. To him, it is better than BASIC which would become prevalent later. Of course, he had many more accomplishments during his long career that spanned the HP, Agilent, and Keysight eras. He is now mostly retired, but still involved with Keysight. His title is Principal Engineer Emeritus. Title as fancy as the pants, if you ask me.

And yes, I had to ask about the famous pants. He gave me the scoop on the story behind it, but you'll have to wait for the video cut and for Bob to review and approve it, which I promised he'd be entitled to do. 

Marc