Chuck Bilbe began his engineering career at NCR as a designer of military electronics. His power supply design was used in the AWACS airborne printer, and he did logic circuit design for the Skylab space station printer as well. He joined King Radio Corporation in 1973 and was the designer of that company's first digital large-scale integrated (LSI) circuit which formed the heart of the KT76A transponder. He was actively involved in the engineering and testing of other King Radio LSI chip designs. He also did all the software programming and much of the electronic design for the KNR665 area-navigation computer, the first King Radio product to be microprocessor-controlled.Later, he worked for a number of well-known companies including Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, and Sun Microsystems, doing a wide range of system hardware designs and software projects. At Hewlett-Packard he was the lead software designer for that company's HP1630A digital Logic Analyzer, one of the first Hewlett-Packard parallel-bus logic analyzers. He was also Project Manager for that company's embedded-systems high-level-language compiler group, and was instrumental in the design of an optimizing C compiler product, which utilized automated an optimizing compiler-generator program of his design.
While at Sun Microsystems and Oregon Software, Mr. Bilbe implemented a number of high-level-language compiler systems, specializing in machine-code optimization and runtime library software, and debugger support hook software in the compiler system.
After many years in the rather abstract field of computer software, Mr. Bilbe became interested in flying, and became involved as an entrepreneur, developing touchscreen drivers for in-flight computers, moving-map software, navigation programs, and high-speed photorealistic graphic software for the IBM PC architecture. Most recently, Mr. Bilbe has been working with Mr. Younkin in the design and development of the microprocessor system and software of the TruTrak family of digital autopilot products.