Charles "Charlie" Bass, is an American electrical engineer,

academician An academician is a full member of an artistic, literary, engineering, or scientific academy. In many countries, it is an honorific title used to denote a full member of an academy that has a strong influence on national scientific life. In syst ...

and

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values t ...

. He was the co-founder of the networking company

Ungermann-Bass Ungermann-Bass, also known as UB and UB Networks, was a computer networking company in the 1980s to 1990s. Located in Santa Clara, California, UB was the first large networking company independent of any computer manufacturer. Along with competito ...

in 1979. Led by

Ralph Ungermann Ralph Kelley Ungermann (20 January 1942 – 2 June 2015) was an American engineer and entrepreneur. He is best known for founding Zilog with Federico Faggin and Ungermann-Bass with Charlie Bass. Due to his work in U-B, he was considered to ...

and staffed by several colleagues from Zilog, Ungermann-Bass helped commercialize

ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1 ...

, had a successful IPO, and then was purchased by

Tandem Computers Tandem Computers, Inc. was the dominant manufacturer of fault-tolerant computer systems for ATM networks, banks, stock exchanges, telephone switching centers, and other similar commercial transaction processing applications requiring maximum up ...

. Bass was also co-founder of Starlight Networks in late 1990, a

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

company involved in streaming media and Socket Mobile, Inc. in 1992. In 1972, Bass received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the

University of Hawaii A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, th ...

. He has taught at

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

;

University of California, Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of ...

; and Stanford University, and he worked for Zilog. In 1989, he formed his own

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to start-up company, startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth poten ...

company, Bass Associates. Bass is currently an advisor to Horizon VenturesHorizon Ventures

References

University of Hawaii COE Distinguished Lecture Series ''Charlie Bass: How To Maneuver Venture Capital''
21st-century American engineers Living people 1941 births {{US-engineer-stub