Rex Eugene Brooks

Rex Eugene Brooks died in his Portola Valley home early Saturday morning, April 4. Brooks was 91 years old and had advanced Alzheimer's Disease. Prior to his retirement, however, Brooks possessed one of the most nimble, precise and perseverant minds in Silicon Valley. Brooks' history, from his arrival in 1963 onward, tracks the evolution of Silicon Valley's electronics industry. Brooks' engineering career stretched from furnishing mission critical components for America's early space program, to devising the controller of the country's first video game, to supplying the electronic guts of Apple's first computers. Brooks Technical Group, the electronics representative company he founded, grew to be immensely successful because Brooks was a creative perfectionist. He was able to perceive the trajectory of a new consumer electronics market, then conceive of the components required to satisfy finicky and fickle customers. For Atari Inc.'s Nolan Bushnell, Brooks envisioned the use of a long lifecycle potentiometer to serve as a paddle in the first iteration of Pong. This electronic version of ping pong was so addictive that some of its early arcade games were returned as seemingly broken. In fact, customers shoved quarters so quickly into the game that the coin slot jammed. Brooks' most successful salesman, who would later become his partner of thirty years, was Harley Licht. In the early 1970s Licht had kept haphazardly running into a fellow named Steve Wozniak at different places in the Valley— when operating radio-controlled hobby aircraft, when shopping for Ham radio parts and photographic equipment, when visiting Hewlett Packard to comprehend its semiconductors. Their accidental encounters led to a friendship and, through his association with Wozniak, Licht was introduced to Steve Jobs, with whom he would form a close and long-lasting relationship. Licht knew how to handle Jobs' compulsively confrontational personality, but Rex Brooks knew how to handle Licht. In their thirty years of working together, Licht cannot remember a single dispute between the two of them. Brooks was known to everyone in his field as a gentleman's gentleman. He commanded respect not just because of his dignified personality but also because he was a knowledgeable perfectionist. He would only sell products that he completely understood. This understanding came from a meticulous meshing of an engineer's vision with a searching inquiry into the customer's needs. Brooks Technical Group was for a long time the sole representative of SONY Corporation of America's OEM components in Northern California. SONY was as difficult to work with as Bushnell and Jobs, but in a different way. Because SONY felt its brand name was immensely valuable, it bargained to pay Brooks less than his company's normal commission. Making lemonade out of lemons, Brooks countered by everywhere advertising his company's exclusive relationship with SONY. Brooks Technical Group kept pace with Silicon Valley's whirlwind evolution. Eventually Apple, BTG's largest customer, would only accept invoices processed on their computers. Brooks upgraded his entire company's sales and accounting departments to comply, making it the first electronics representative company to fully computerize. Rex Brooks was born into poverty on August 6, 1928. Fatherless from an early age, he grew up in San Francisco. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley in 1951. An optimist and risk-taker by nature, one of Brooks' favorite sayings was: "You'll never find new land if you're afraid to lose sight of the shore." Brooks' self-deprecating sense of humor remained constant. He was fond of reminding himself and others that in life "no amount of planning can ever replace dumb luck." Brooks began his career essentially as a salesman and marketer for specified electronic components needed by the defense industry. Gradually, in an ever-changing electronics marketplace, he became an innovator whose technical abilities were admired and whose integrity was revered. He is predeceased by his wife of 60 years, Colleen Walker Brooks; and is survived by a daughter, Claudia Brooks, and a son, Robert Brooks, both of Menlo Park. No service is planned at this time due to the Coronavirus outbreak.