On 10/25/18 11:06 AM, Jim Manley via cctalk wrote: > Obviously, he returned to academia before the project collapsed in a heap, > and he might have had to scramble and compete with other departing CS PhDs > (who would also have hung around too long). Many would probably be looking > at another job where microprocessor microcode, assembler, linker, compiler, > and system-level library development experience would have been highly > desirable, and perhaps where the EEs were more reasonable. Plus, he didn't > have to put "Served on what became the sunken shipwreck iAPX 432" on his > resume/CV. That's because it wasn't yet at the Sixth Phase in the Six > Phases of a Project, "Punishment of the Innocent, and Rewards for the > Non-Participants".
Sigh, I remember the 432 being talked up by "Fast Eddie" our Intel inside sales guy. "Micro mainframe" will be the best thing since the bread knife. We began to get an inkling of trouble when we requested ballpark estimates of the cost of the various chips (the 432 is not a single chip microcomputer--the basic family, as I recall was no less than three (43201, 43202 and 43203) QIP chips. The cost for the set given to us in the range of 4 figures. As time went on, Eddie talked less and less about this and then went completely silent--his response was basically "you don't want to know". I don't recall if this was before or after performance benchmark numbers started to appear. While this was a failure on a spectacular level, it was by no means the only misstep by Intel. The i860 RISC CPU at one time was even being endorsed by BillG as a possible personal computer basis. I think that the follow-on, the i960 was somewhat successful. One thing you need in this business is a good back-of-the-neck sense. Sometime in the late 1970s, I was invited up to Beaverton by Tek to interview for the position of project manager for their new color graphics display terminal. I don't recall many technical details--it was a one-day visit. Tek was enthusiastic about getting me on board and had even scheduled the movers. About 4 days before they were set to arrive, I called off the offer--I'd had a really terrible dream about the project and couldn't shake the cold sweats. It turned out that the project came in late and way above estimates for Tek, with layoffs resulting. A bullet dodged by a dream. --Chuck