I worked with Mike for a couple of years on Newton. I had tremendous respect for his breadth of understanding of systems, from transistors and batteries all the way up to user interaction. He was a hardware designer who really understood software, too; in my experience, that's rare.

We've lost another great engineer to cancer. This sucks.

My condolences to his family, friends and co-workers.

Does "digital content escrow for iTunes purchases" refer to Apple's grouping of multiple iTunes purchases into a single credit card transaction, as described here: http://qr.ae/T3uTd ?

No. It is described at http://www.google.com/patents/US20090070122?pg=PA1&dq=mi...

It is a pity that there is nearly nothing (articles, words, videos) on the web about this excellent engineer.

He had a paper in CompCon 94 (it's behind an IEEE paywall, though).

"Low power hardware for a high performance PDA" http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&ar...

Walter Smith's site may have a mirror, but I can't get to it right now.

You could read through his list of invented/co-invented patents:

http://www.google.com/?tbm=pts#safe=off&output=search...

I realize it's not quite what you meant.

Thank you. In some extent, these patents are the best things left for an engineer.

Rest in peace, Mike will certainly be missed