(written by his daughter, Regina Nicole Grimm, December 2024)
Dennis (Maynard) Grimm was born in 1946 in Mason City, Iowa. His father was an electrician, and Dennis had an interest working with electronics at a very early age. At age 5, Dennis’s mom would take him to the hardware store to buy plugs and cords, which he wanted much more than toys. He would wire things together like his father taught him. Dennis loved taking things apart to see how they worked.
Dennis had a natural talent and intuitive understanding of electronics and was gifted at solving tough logic puzzles. In high school he worked for a radio/TV repair show and made his own hand-made video camera for the school science fair. There were a few special parts he need to make his project work and he contacted the companies to see if they would donate them. They did, and Dennis won his school’s science fair with a working video camera.
Dennis knew he wanted to be an electrical engineer. However, he struggled with severe dyslexic and Asperger syndrome, which made it hard to learn certain subjects in a traditional college program. Since he knew college “wouldn’t be fun” he decided to go to a technical school with hands-on learning and choose the DeVry Technical Institute in Chicago, Illinois. He graduated from DeVry with an associate degree in Applied Science in Electronic Engineering 1967.
After graduating, a friend of his recruited Dennis to join Xerox corporation’s manufacturing department in Rochester, New York. He started there as a junior technician. After several years of working, and after serving in the Vietnam War, Dennis realized he couldn’t progress to an engineer level without a degree. In 1971 he enrolled in night school with the Rochester Institute of Technology and earned a bachelor of science degree in Electrical Engineering Technology. While at Xerox he worked in their copier manufacturing department. He learned to be a great test engineer and trouble-shooter.
Although he loved working for Xerox, Dennis was recruited to join a Xerox subsidiary, Diablo systems, and moved to Fremont, California in 1980. He continued to work in test engineer and the main product he worked on was dot matrix printers. In 1982, when a close co-worker at Diablo Systems, Sam Lyle, took a job with Apple computer it opened to the door for Dennis to also join Apple. Dennis joined Apple’s test engineering team and worked in their factory in Fremont. The projects he started with were the Lisa and Apple IIe. After demonstrating his talents within Apple, Steve Jobs selected him to join the Macintosh Team. By then they were finished with designing the Mac and were ready to start making them.
Dennis’s role on the Mac Team was to develop tools to efficiently and accurately test the Macintosh machines as they left the assembly line and to work with the development team to trouble-shoot design flaws. During his time at Apple, Dennis was responsible for creating a testing setup for the Macintosh 128k production plant, development of the Macintosh HD20 hard disk -code named ”Nisha”-, troubleshooting the Apple LaserWriter production error, overseeing the development of the FileServer, creating a testing setup for the Macintosh SE production line and much more. The testing platform at the factory sped up production and ensured a quality product. At a Christmas party, when talking with Dennis’s wife, Steve Jobs told her “Dennis is the best test engineer in the Bay Area.”
In 1988, after Steve Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT, Dennis was recruited to join the new company. He continued to bring his talents for problem solving, debugging, and test engineering. Later, when other former colleagues from the Mac 100 Team started the company Radius, Inc., they recruited Dennis to join them. He worked there for a few years.
After working so many years with a focus on test engineering Dennis wanted to branch out and do his own product design. He went back to one of his original interests in making video cameras and joined two others to create a start-up company called Silicon Vision. They were one of the first companies to manufacture small personal video cameras to attach to laptops and computer monitors. Their design was patented several years prior to when computer cameras became popular. Unfortunately, like so many Silicon Valley start-ups, their company didn’t make it in the long run.
Dennis finished up his career by starting a sole-proprietor business. He called it “putting out his own shingle”. In many ways it was the most successful time of his career, and he loved the freedom of making his own hours and working from home in his favorite spot, his electronics workshop.
Dennis retired in 2004 and in 2007 moved to Washington State. His retirement project was focused on building a huge 5000 sq/ft shop house (combo house and workshop). He loved to build things, loved to fix things, and loved working with all his tools. He passed away in 2022.
