Bill Fischer

I was so sorry to hear of Bill Fischer’s passing this week. I had the pleasure of working with Bill at VideoLabs in the nineties and then at Vaddio. 

My first meeting with Bill happened at Acoustic when we were combining VideoLabs and Acoustic Communications together. Bill had come over to our office to look at a very homemade ceiling document camera we had cobbled together and installed in the ceiling.    It really wasn’t much more that Hitachi block camera module mounted in a speaker back box that we controlled with a Crestron control system. Kinda cool but the wiring and using a control system every time left much to be desired. Well, Bill took a look at it and thought the idea was pretty cool but the implementation left much to be desired. In a few weeks he came back with a control board he had soldered together for using a universal IR remote control for control and then a couple of transformers that could convert the impedance of our S-video signal into a balanced signal that could run on Cat 5 cabling. It worked brilliantly and that little project would end up revolutionizing the AV industry and cause me to start a company called Vaddio a few years later.

Engineers are the rocket fuel for any technology company. Great ideas happen everyday, but it’s engineers like Bill that really make it all happen. Bill was one of those unique engineers that not only understood the technology but also understood how our integrators wanted to use it. For complex technology to be adopted in any product, it needs to be simple. Bill knew how to make it simple, and that was something I saw him do many times with new products over the years.

But most of all Bill was a great friend, and the older I get the more I realize that great friends are what life all about. Bill would come into the record store and we would talk for hours about the crazy world of technology and where it was heading next. He loved technology and he loved being able to create some amazing products. He was the best engineer I've ever worked with.

I am sure gonna miss you my friend