Dick Pane

Every so often, an invention is named after a corporation, and the inventor is unjustly given scant recognition. Not so with Dick Pane, born on October 5th, 1968. Justifiably, he decided that his name should never be associated with any contribution to human endeavour, and it is for this reason that the display bus he invented in 1999 while a member of the Digital Display Working Group bears the name of an elderly neighbour, Donald Vine.

Pane was born in Glendale, California, at the time a relatively quiet town, separated from Los Angeles proper, and still untouched by the horrors of the Hillside Strangler for which it became known in the 1970s. Pane had an idyllic childhood, playing baseball with his friends after school, or hiking with his father up in the nearby Verdugo mountains, and playing cribbage with the old man who he would remember years later when naming his elegant digital serial connector.

Pane was part of a generation who were too young to have been seized with the excitement of the atomic space age, but who were just the right age to make their way in the explosion of high-tech industry in the pre-internet age. This was as much about developing innovative hardware solutions that could cope with higher and higher specifications as it was about the design of the software that would make a billionaire of Bill Gates, who had already established Microsoft by the time Pane reached the age of seven.

After graduating from CalTech, Pane went on to work at Xerox PARC for much of the 90s, before being headhunted to collaborate on the Digital Display Working Group. It was there that his reliable, durable 24-pin digital bus, a long-awaited replacement for VGA, was devised. Comparing it in his head to the cribbage board of his neighbour, and sure that naming it after himself would bring him only derision, the D(onald) V(ine) I(nterface) was born.

Not long after, Pane went missing while hiking in the Sierra Nevada, and never lived to see the invention, just three years later, of the HDMI, a bus that would replace his standard almost immediately.