For the 24 weeks duration from 12 January 1998 to 26 June 1998, I was attached to Motorola Electronics Pte Ltd for my Industrial Attachment. "Wow! Did you have any 'free' pagers or handphones ?" This was a common question from friends who got to know that I was attached to Motorola.

Strategic Applied Idea Lab Members (Partial) From left to right: Chue Wai Lian (IA Student), Yap Seng Hooi (Systems Engineer & IA Supervisor), Lilian Teo (Secretary), Soh Sock Hoon (Understudy), Satya Jaya (Business Development Manager), Ang KG (Associate Engineer)

Strategic Applied Idea Lab (SAIL) was the division I was attached to, which comes under Marketing department. "Huh ? An Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) student in the Marketing department ?" some of you may wonder. Although I have taken Financial Accounting as a general elective during my second year study in Nanyang Technological University (NTU), this was definitely not the reason for my "existence" in the Marketing department.

For my attachment, I was involved in a project to shift paging into an information medium in Singapore by adding web-browsing capability to a pager. Yes, this is an Internet related project (which I have always looked forward to) and my main task was to develop parser programs to collect content / information from the web. This information service was first showcased at CommunicAsia 1998 (held at Suntec City) with Motorola occupying the largest booth (It was indeed a wonderful experience for me to be involved in the trade show).

Besides developing parser programs, the following tasks were also performed:

• Hardware / Software installation and configuration of "Godzilla" servers (Yes, their "Size does Matter").
• Designed and developed web pages.
• Designed and developed a web-based touch-screen GUI (Graphical User Interface) for multimedia kiosks.
• Familiarised with new alphanumeric pagers still under development (One of which was Scriptor Jazz which was launched at CommunicAsia 1998).

The most rewarding part of my attachment was to have hands-on on the state of the art computer technology as well as to witness the superb performance and capabilities of the latest Intel Pentium II 333 MHz microprocessor.

I would like to express my appreciation and gratitude to all the colleagues at SAIL especially Seng Hooi (for giving me the opportunity to collaborate with him) and Satya (for his valuable suggestions and comments) who have made my attachment a pleasant, rewarding and fine learning experience. Last but not least, I would like to thank my NTU tutor, Dr Li Gang, for his valuable comments and time in reading my logbook and my final report during his visits to Motorola.

Copyright© 2007 by Chue Wai Lian

Last updated on Wednesday, 26 December 2007

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