BMag-2012 - University of Birmingham

24 The Birmingham Magazine
CREATING A
NEW DIMENSION
Technology pioneer Osman Kent (BSc Computer Science
and Electrical Engineering, 1981) has been making waves
throughout his career with cutting-edge developments.
It is hard to remember a time when we didn’t
own a PC or a Mac, couldn’t relive our favourite
movies in 3D or wile away our time playing
video games from the comfort of our homes.
We have Birmingham graduate Osman Kent
to thank for some of these guilty pleasures.
Known as one of the founding fathers of the
3D graphics revolution on the PC, serial
technology and media entrepreneur Osman,
originally from Turkey, first came to England to
pursue his passion in music. With his parents’
encouragement to study a more ‘proper’
subject, he became part of the first cohort
of students at Birmingham to study the joint
honours programme, Computer Science
and Electronics Engineering, developing
the world’s first music transcription machine
in his final year.
‘It was a fascinating degree, but as we were
the first ever intake, it wasn’t very organised,’
Osman remembers. ‘I think we did just about
everything the Computer Science and the
Electronics Engineering students did and so
it was very intense but I had a fantastic time.’
He credits his time at Birmingham for helping
to shape his ambitions which led to him
becoming the co-founder and CEO of 3Dlabs,
one of the fastest growing companies in
Silicon Valley, USA and at one time a $1billion
company on NASDAQ.
‘I had so much encouragement from my tutors
at Birmingham that I literally felt like I could
change the world,’ he says. ‘The belief system
made us all feel like we really could do anything
we wanted and make a real difference and
some of us have.
‘I loved my time at Birmingham so much that I
wanted to stay there forever. I applied for a job
in the Computer Centre after graduation and it
was my old professor on the interview panel.
He smiled at me and then refused to interview
me, saying he would be doing the world a
disservice by keeping me there. I was upset
at the time, but with hindsight it is one of the
best things anyone has ever done for me.’
Doing exactly what he said he would never
do after witnessing the trials and tribulations
of his business-owner father, Osman, aged
just 25, set up his own company with a fellow
Birmingham graduate Dr Yavuz Ahiska (BSc
Electrical Engineering, 1974). benchMark
Technologies Ltd created the first computer
with high-resolution graphics, transforming
police fingerprinting stations and
graphic animations.
The giant DuPont corporation purchased
benchMark for $12 million in 1988 and four
years later, Osman and partner Yavuz Ahiska
engineered a management buyout of DuPont
and 3Dlabs was born. The world’s first
graphics chip for PCs was developed
by the company the following year which
kickstarted the 3D revolution that has
become so ubiquitous today.
‘It’s quite nice to know that we had a hand
in helping PCs become the workstation of
choice and the dominant graphics platform,’
he explains. ‘Especially as it was such an
audacious idea as neither of us had ever
designed a chip in our lives.’
With all of these amazing achievements behind
him, it is a much more humbling moment which
Osman points to as being the proudest of his
professional career.
‘Around the time of September 11 the stock
markets took a hit and the company went
through a really tough time. We had a cash-
flow crisis and it was looking likely that I
would have to lay off half our employees,’
he remembers.
‘The management team stood up and told the
workforce that we were all taking 20% salary
cuts, and I had agreed to an annual income of
$1. Of course we couldn’t force our employees
to do the same, but we said any contribution
they could make would have a real difference.
I was in tears by the end of the night as without
exception everyone in the company had
reduced their salary by 10–20%. It was really
inspiring to know that everyone believed in us