When Exxon Wanted To Be a Personal Computing Revolutionary

An anonymous reader writes with this story about Exxon's early involvement with consumer computers. "This weekend is the anniversary of the release of the Apple IIc, the company's fourth personal computer iteration and its first attempt at creating a portable computer. In 1981, Apple's leading competitor in the world of consumer ('novice') computer users was IBM, but the market was about to experience a deluge of also-rans and other silent partners in PC history, including the multinational descendant of Standard Oil, Exxon. The oil giant had been quietly cultivating a position in the microprocessor industry since the mid-1970s via the rogue Intel engineer usually credited with developing the very first commercial microprocessor, Federico Faggin, and his startup Zilog. Faggin had ditched Intel in 1974, after developing the 4004 four-bit CPU and its eight-bit successor, the 8008. As recounted in Datapoint: The Lost Story of the Texans Who Invented the Personal Computer, Faggin was upset about Intel's new requirement that employees had to arrive by eight in the morning, while he usually worked nights. Soon after leaving Intel and forming Zilog, Faggin was approached by Exxon Enterprises, the investment arm of Exxon, which began funding Zilog in 1975."

Comments

Ah the Z-80

[ColdWetDog]

My first (microprocessor) love. And one that would have remained faithful had I not been entranced by bigger silicon....

Re:Ah the Z-80

[Crashmarik]

I still remember hoping the successors would make some headway. LSI-11, MC68000, Z-80 all proof that evolution doesn't select for excellence.

Re:Ah the Z-80

[LMariachi]

Z80s are still being manufactured and still in use all over the place, just not so's you'd see them.

Re:Ah the Z-80

[Anonymous Coward]

The electronics industry isn't a natural process, it's part of human artifice, so I would say that it's proof that the market doesn't select for excellence, and that's explored well in such things as "The Century of Self" and the reason why marketing departments, even if staffed by idiots, are well funded: people buy what they are told about, more than what has the best functionality for developers. Even if the target market is developers... ARM is less well known than Intel despite leading by volume for decades, all due to the marketing thrust of Intel. Similar with Intel vs. AMD... AMD innovates but Intel copies and promotes. None of this is natural or evolution, it is all intentional and artificial and could easily go another way once you comprehend the platform or medium of the market.

But, I liked your joke, thanks :)

Re:Ah the Z-80

[ChrisMaple]

The Z80 design was moribund for several years. If Zilog had quickly made a compatible successor to the Z80 with a 16 bit datapath and a multiply instruction, we'd be complaining about a Zilog monopoly instead of Intel.

Re:Ah the Z-80

[Anonymous Coward]

My first (microprocessor) love. And one that would have remained faithful had I not been entranced by bigger silicon....

Are you sure it was bigger silicon and not bigger silicone?

Re:Ah the Z-80

[drinkypoo]

Z80s are still being manufactured and still in use all over the place, just not so's you'd see them.

The same is true of 68k-family cores, which are also still being used in pretty much the same places as Z80s.

Re:Ah the Z-80

[Anonymous Coward]

They did, it was called the Z280

Re:Ah the Z-80

[jeffb (2.718)]

If you have a child in middle school, there's a very good chance they'll be required to use a TI calculator -- these days, a TI-84, most likely. Those calculators run on a Z80. If your child's ambitious, he/she can still tinker with Z80 assembly on an actual physical host.

This is a small tribute to the Z80 processor, and huge, scathing indictment of TI's lock on the education market. ~US$100 for a Z80-based calculator? In 2015? It was a sweet chip in 1977, and it's clearly still useful. But at this point the calculators should be selling for well under $10.

Re:Ah the Z-80

[Anonymous Coward]

Z80 also had a radiation hardened version so It's used in a lot of special locations, rabbit semiconductor, now digi, still makes them and includes support current network technologies

Re: Ah the Z-80

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it was Z800

Re:Ah the Z-80

[TheRaven64]

They're increasingly hard to justify though. Cortex-M cores are really, really cheap (M0 and M0+ especially) and a modern 32-bit instruction set can be a significant win. You can't justify a 16-bit microcontroller on cost grounds anymore, let alone an 8-bit one. The main places Z80s are used is in systems designed in the early '80s that would cost too much to change, but which need periodic repairs.

I've seen a few things recently that have taken an amusing middle ground and bought ARM cores and used them to run a Z80 emulator, because it was cheaper to get the associated peripherals to attach to the ARM core.

Re:Ah the Z-80

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of forgotten Japanese chips (very power efficient) the Dec Alpha chip, then TI's.Even Rockwell. Z80's were also made by others and the IBM Dauphin 386 was the first handheld , maybe.The real question is why did Z80 loose its lead?

Re:Ah the Z-80

[AmiMoJo]

8 bit MCUs are still very common and have many advantages of ARM. Cheap as ARM is it doesn't tend to get down to the few tens of cents range that 8 bit MCUs do, and the cores often require much more support hardware (such as voltage regulation because they can't run from 5V, or need 1.8V to get the power consumption down). Developing for them is also much more involved and particularly for high reliability applications it can be harder to audit the code and guarantee safe operation.

ARM has a lot of advantages too, but when you just need a cheap, easy to use (software and hardware wise) MCU that consumes next to now power 8 bit is still king.

Re:Ah the Z-80

[cheesybagel]

Sitting on their laurels and ignoring backwards compatibility.

Re:Ah the Z-80

[Anonymous Coward]

Definitely one of the finer moments in my life was spent around the TI-83+ also powered by the Z80. Learning ASM was a very fun endeavor. I still remember so many "WOW!!" moments as people discovered more and more clever ways of doing things in Z80 assembly. By the time I left that particular scene I remember that video playback was the major push of the moment- faking grayscale and everything- was pretty awesome.

Re:Ah the Z-80

[Agripa]

I considered the Z-80 a big upgrade from the 8080 simply because the assembly syntax discerned type from the operands like the later 8086; I hated having separate mnemonics for this on the 8080. The dedicated index registers and their addressing modes were nice as well. I considered the 8086 a further improvement over the Z-80.

Re:Ah the Z-80

[Agripa]

The crown jewels of the TI programmable calculators is the firmware and not the hardware. HP had a similar thing going and wrote an emulator running on ARM to emulate the Saturn 4 bit CPU from their earlier calculators maintaining backward comparability.

Re:Ah the Z-80

[Agripa]

8 bit and maybe 16 bit alternatives to ARM where higher performance is not necessary are still both cheaper and lower power but the infrastructure advantage of ARM is making even that difficult to ignore and I would not want to run an IP networking stack on anything smaller. I suspect the largest advantage 8 and 16 bit microcontrollers have at this point is that they are available in packages that ARM is not but should be. The ARM manufacturers seem to be playing a game of market segmentation which is hurting them at the low end.

Re:Ah the Z-80

[cwsumner]

A big advantage of the Z-80 was the peripheral chips, are they still available?

In the days where a printer port has a plug-in board 10 inches across, the Zilog chips allowed much smaller and simpler boards. We built a hardened system for RF transmitter control that was one quarter the size and cost of the competition.

I was very disappointed that later chips sets still required so many extra "helper" chips. It was not until about 15 years ago that (almost) single-chip peripherals re-appeared.

Z80 was in TRS-80

[ShanghaiBill]

I remember learning Z80 assembly on the "Thrash 80". Great microprocessor. It had two register banks, so context switches, and interrupts, were really fast. There were also some undocumented instructions, and if you knew those you had a lot of street cred with the other teenage nerds. Fun times.

Re:Z80 was in TRS-80

[Hovsep]

I learned programming on a TRS-80 Model II myself. As I recall it was the "Trash-80," not the "Thrash-80." A derogatory name quickly picked up by it's fans as it's nickname. CLOAD A...and hope the tape wouldn't fuck up in some way or another. At least it worked which is more than I can say for trying to save or read from tapes on a Timex 1000. Was anyone ever successful in getting a cassette tape to work with that thing?

Re:Z80 was in TRS-80

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I used cassettes with my ZX81 (what it was called before it was imported by Timex) quite extensively. The programs were so short I would make a mark with permanent marker on the tape where they started and could find each one by advancing the tape with a pen in the take-up reel.

Re:Z80 was in TRS-80

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I was able to save and load "programs" with the cassette player for the Timex Sinclair 1000. With 2K of ram, the thing was a joke. However at 10, I was so excited to get my first computer. I so wanted to get the 16K expansion module, just didn't have the money. Laughable now.

Re:Z80 was in TRS-80

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I was able to save and load "programs" with the cassette player for the Timex Sinclair 1000. With 2K of ram, the thing was a joke. However at 10, I was so excited to get my first computer. I so wanted to get the 16K expansion module, just didn't have the money. Laughable now.

Personal computers were a lot more fun back in the day. I pity children who will never know their computers as intimately as those of us whose first computer was bought during the late 1970s or early 1980s. I remember a time when I knew the hexadecimal and decimal codes for every Commodore BASIC token, knew every memory address of consequence, and could develop programmes in BASIC or 6502 assembly language. It was nirvana when I finally got a MODEM although for about three months the toll charges on the telephone bill were outrageous; CompuServe eventually offered a local telephone number and 300 baud was perfect reading speed. And yes I had a cassette tape reader/writer known as a datasette long before I ever bought a floppy drive. I almost bought a Timex Sinclair 1000 but my high school mathematics recommended the Commodore VIC-20. There was no way I could afford a Commodore PET or SuperPET as a student.

Re:Z80 was in TRS-80

[93 Escort Wagon]

My first summer job was at a music store, doing some simple coding and data management on a TRS-80 (with 16K, BASIC, and even a floppy drive!). At least that was my job when they didn't need me to man the till or help fill out rental contracts for students who were going to be taking band.

There were some simple software packages available commercially for stuff like payroll, but my boss wanted custom stuff so I wrote it all myself.

I remember staying late a lot, after the store closed, and playing games that I first had to manually copy the code for out of computer magazines. Ah, memories...

Re:Z80 was in TRS-80

[Larryish]

THIS.

Was using a TI-99 4A until 1991.

Had a few better machines (Atari 800XL and a C64) but kept coming back to the TI.

Graphics were a loss (remapping ASCII character bitmaps? orly?) but the handling of data in a program was so simple and beautiful, even using tape. Fond memories.

Now everything gets Linux on it. Architecture? Meh. Works on everything.

More powerful, more usable.

But not nearly as much fun.

God I miss 80's computing.

Re:Z80 was in TRS-80

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I was 18 or so when I bought a BBC micro model B. I wrote a game in BBC Basic - Asteroid (it only had one asteroid).

^^

Re:Z80 was in TRS-80

[SalafranceUnderhill]

I don't miss it. My desktop has 6 cores, 2 TB of mirrored local storage, 12Gb of RAM, an internet connection faster than the first couple of iterations of *ethernet*, and a GPU that would have caused wars back in the 80s. My *phone* has 8 cores, accelerometers, an inbuilt compass, GPS, always-on data, a less powerful but in context still silly GPU, 2GB RAM, 80GB of local storage in flash, and software that looks like science fiction. My *router* would stand in for a credible mainframe back in the day.

If I had the space, I would love to collect older computer hardware - I had an original Pizza-box Sun 4C when I lived in a large house, and I also had a ZX Spectrum. It doesn't blind me to the realities, though.

I do look back at the 80s with nostalgia, but I remember how frustratingly limited everything seemed. I feel a sense of awe pretty much all the time, now, tinged with hope and a little fear, when I think of how this freakishly powerful technology can be used to accelerate the acquisition of new knowledge.

Interesting times.

Re:Z80 was in TRS-80

[TheRaven64]

God I miss 80's computing.

I don't, but if you want to get the same fun without all of the old annoyances there are two things I'd recommend:

The first is to get an FPGA dev board. BlueSpec is a nice proprietary high-level HDL that is free for academic use, but if you don't qualify for that then CHISEL from Berkeley is also not bad - they're both a nice step above Verilog / VHDL.

The second is the mbed boards from various ARM partners. Some ARM folks handed me one of these to play with a few months back. These are aimed at getting embedded development to people who don't normally do it. They've got all of the fun I/O stuff from the BBC micro (plus some new stuff like USB and Ethernet) and a nicely put together development environment.

Re:Z80 was in TRS-80

[tigersha]

I agree with you. It is still possible to get a lot of the 80's feel by playing with Arduinos and Raspberry Pi's. I will definietly look at the mbed thing.
A few eeks ago I helped my dad to keep an old SCO Unix program running that he has been using for 20 years. He could not us the terminal anymore because he could not get floppy disks to boot DOS for his special terminal program. So we looked into using a RaspPi with ckermit.

Any suggestions on that FPGA board?

Re:Z80 was in TRS-80

[volmtech]

I still have my ZX 81. I wrote an accounting program to track expenses on my 300 acre farm. I had no trouble loading the tape every month. All my entries were stored in variables. I could print reports sorted by month, vendor, or category on a 4 inch thermal printer. I used it for three years until I got a TRS-80 Model 4P in 1984. I used that for 10 years until it died.

Re:Z80 was in TRS-80

[OutOnARock]

I remember it well...my father worked for Univac at the time. He bought one of the first 100 TRS-80s off the line.

Of course he opened it up and our motherboard had hand soldered wires to replace incorrect traces on the board.

That winter, we lived in Tennessee at the time, we got so much snow that from Christmas to the end of January we had 3 school days.

What I remember most was the "Learning Basic" book, with the TRS-80 with legs talking to you from the margins.....

good times....good time....

Re:Z80 was in TRS-80

[TheRaven64]

Any suggestions on that FPGA board?

We use the Terasic DE4 for most things, but it's insanely expensive - definitely only a board to use if someone else is paying. The SoCKit is quite nice - much cheaper and has a dual-core ARM board. We've ported FreeBSD to the ARM (adding devices for programming the FPGA) and our MIPS-compatible softcore to the FPGA, with virtio communicating between the two, which makes it easy to play with heterogeneous multicore. It's mainly intended for prototyping accelerator cores and there's a fast cache-coherent interconnect between the ARM cores and the FPGA so it's quite a nice platform to play with if you want to try and offload computation to the FPGA. It's a fairly small FPGA by modern standards, but still big enough for our CPU, which is a 6-stage in-order pipeline with caches, TLB, branch predictor and so on.

Managers & HR take note

[MrLogic17]

Mangers! Learn this lesson from history: Intel lost one of the word's greatest computer chip designers, and created their own competition by making arbitrary work requirements, and not recognizing work-life balance.

Employees are people, not machines. Your greatest talent will, at some point, say "screw you" - and start competing with you. Unless you take care of them like human beings.

Re:Managers & HR take note

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel knows this now, that's why it keeps AMD alive.

And has an ARM license.

Re:Managers & HR take note

[Michael Woodhams]

There are three lessons here. One is about arbitrary work requirements, which you've made well.

Second is the problems which arise when vertical integration in your company means that one level's customers are another level's competitors. This conflict of interest is liable to drive away customers. (A company my father worked for many years ago had a similar issue: one branch manufactured and sold refrigeration equipments and spare parts. Another branch maintained and repaired refrigeration equipment, so their competition was the manufacturing branch's customers. The maintenance branch was separated into a new company to avoid this problem.)

Third is when you have a large corporation with an innovative product, that innovative product's potential can easily be crippled by being held hostage to vested interests of other parts of the corporation.

Re:Managers & HR take note

[Anonymous Coward]

Mangers! Learn this lesson from history

You're making the mistake of presupposing that managers care about anything beyond the grooming of their own egos. They don't.

Re:Managers & HR take note

[Fire_Wraith]

Good ones do. Unfortunately most of their bosses don't necessarily value that (though they value paying lip service to it), so much as they value cutting labor costs, and usually more of the short term variety, even if those short term cuts lead to much larger costs in the long run (penny wise, pound foolish, etc). So to the extent that they think it benefits them,

Re:Managers & HR take note

[turbidostato]

"Mangers! Learn this lesson from history: Intel lost one of the word's greatest computer chip designers, and created their own competition by making arbitrary work requirements, and not recognizing work-life balance."

Minions! Learn this lesson from history: even the greatest computer chip designer can't build a competition against us, so you'd better welcome your management overlords.

We are Intel, The Almighty, but where is Zylog, now?

Re:Managers & HR take note

[SydShamino]

Third is when you have a large corporation with an innovative product, that innovative product's potential can easily be crippled by being held hostage to vested interests of other parts of the corporation.

Wait, when did we start talking about Sony?

Re:Managers & HR take note

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what killed Eastman Kodak. Worked of them for many, many years. They invented a lot of cool stuff, including the digital camera, but buried it because they didn't want to hurt the film business. "Buried it" - what a joke! I can't believe anyone in charge could possibly believe that it could be buried, but they refused to develop it so they could "save the film business". Now it's "Kodak who?". Sad. It was a great company to work for.

Re:Managers & HR take note

[Anonymous Coward]

you have to read about Gibson's novel about pirating some corporation's rebel genius by blowing up the hotel lobby while the guy was staying at the hotel. Or get out more

Re:Managers & HR take note

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't matter. Managers are well aware who holds the strings in any employment relationship, and if not you, then someone else who will capitulate to their whims. You will starve to death before they even notice.

And even for one of the greatest chip designers; he is a mere footnote in the story of Intel's ascent, and Intel ended up doing quite nicely without him.

That is the lesson from history.

Re:Managers & HR take note

[sjames]

We are Intel, The Almighty, but where is Zylog, now?

Zilog is doing just fine producing microcontrollers based on updates to the Z80.

Re: Managers & HR take note

[Anonymous Coward]

ibm was about as smart.

Re:Managers & HR take note

[houghi]

Some people will say "Screw you" no matter what. If you are an employee, you will need to adapt in some way or another.

That does not mean that you should not treat them like human beings, but asking people to work certain hours, just like the rest, is not that unreasonable.

Obviously we do not know what was going on, but I doubt that was all that was an issue. Most of the times there are more things that are going on.

Re:Managers & HR take note

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm doing "just fine" too. I'm probably the same order of magnitude away from zilog as they are from intel, but for levels of "fineness" approaching Obamacare, well I'm not dead, and that's a good thing.
I don't think anybody should be forced to come to work at 8:00 o'clock, unless of course, they agreed to it when they were hired. People that refuse to honor their own wordare slightly lower than people that cheat on their wives. But still, it's the same thing. Bill Clinton and other democrats don't understand why normal people are reulsed by their behavior. The rest of us realize that if you can't get to work on time, your probably a liberal, or a sociopath.

Re:Managers & HR take note

[AmiMoJo]

Note to PHBs: The lesson is not "make sure they sign a non-compete agreement".

Zilog

[Taco Cowboy]

Actually Zilog was a really fun place to work as I learned a lot of stuffs while working there

Re:Zilog

[drhank1980]

Its interesting that you say that. As somebody who works in fabs, I have always heard horror stories about the working conditions in zilogs fabs. Pretty much all of them are focused on the completely unrealistic (for semiconductor manufacturing) expectations of oil executives as to what process yields and cycle times should be. This was combined with managers that felt it was OK to stand on an employees desk and scream at them.

TIL

[michaelmalak]

First, a correction:

the company's fourth personal computer iteration

True only if you ignore the Apple I and Apple ///, because there was the Apple ][, Apple ][+, and Apple ][e.

Now, the Apple ][c came out during a brief time when I was trying to ignore computers, so I didn't pay much attention to it at the time, but this from the summary caught me by surprise:

first attempt at creating a portable computer

How can anything requiring an external CRT be considered portable? I mean, even by Compaq and Kaypro standards? Looking at Wikipedia, there was apparently a 1-bit LCD display available, but even that was external with no fixed mount. I mean, yeah, they shrunk the form factor, which I would hope they could do after seven years, but portable? No, regardless of their claims.

Re:TIL

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the word at the time was "transportable". I.e you could unplug it and put it in your car.

The first attempt at a truly portable mac, the Mac Portable, also didn't go well. There's a highly entertaining Douglas Adams rant about it somewhere.

Re:TIL

[Anonymous Coward]

Thinking about this:

I lugged an old SGI Sony tube around with me to LAN parties until early 2003. Portable is in the eyes of the beholder.

Re:TIL

[Amouth]

SGI monitors where the absolute best. I did the same as you for many many years. still have the VGA to 5 component cable as a memento.

Re:TIL

[drinkypoo]

How can anything requiring an external CRT be considered portable? I mean, even by Compaq and Kaypro standards?

An Apple II was more portable than e.g. a Kaypro 4 because there was a TV you could use as a monitor pretty much anywhere and it was half the weight to carry around... subjectively, I haven't compared numbers.

Re:TIL

[dissy]

The Apple //c was only 7.5 pounds, which is FAR more portable than the original Compaq portable which was 28 pounds.

I believe the term you are claiming this isn't would be "laptop".
But for the time these were as portable as you got.

You didn't need packaging material due to the slightest shock breaking something, they could be disconnected and moved by a single person without any safety registrations (usually requiring one to lift at least 50 pounds), and could be transported as a single unit.

Of course adding extra peripherals limits that portability - just like now - but the most common hardware was built in and self contained.

The only big downside for portability the Apple //c had was that the display was an option, and you could choose between the attachable LCD or an external black and white (well, green) CRT that was much cheaper. The CRT was not very portable, although I remember being able to carry it by the built in handle as a child, but it was just as fragile as any other CRT at the time.

Re:TIL

[michaelmalak]

TVs just weren't laying around, even in 1985. They were bulky and expensive, and it probably already had a computer or videogame hooked up to it already.

Re:TIL

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not the only one.

Re:TIL

[gl4ss]

by that logic sinclair spectrum was more portable...

if it's portable, it includes the monitor. or rather is an all in one in one portable casing.

Re:TIL

[wisnoskij]

Is it? 7.5 or 28 does not really make a huge difference. Boths portable use case is carry it to the car, walk to the neighbors, etc. Sure it is easier to pick up and move a 7.5 pound device, but 28 pounds is easily movable as well. They both seem to be in the same strata of portability to me.

Re:TIL

[dissy]

Personally I do consider both examples before as portables.

But the only other comparison would be to non-portables, which was most everything else available at the time.

I would say both my PC Jr and AT&T 4400 were pretty small and light compared to most micro-computers before that. But either of those was still three trips to the car, or five trips total for both by putting all the cables and such in a box together.

The Compaq portable was a single trip, as was my first //c with LCD.

Most older micro's, even the ones called "small", required moving equipment and multiple people.

Re:TIL

[drinkypoo]

TVs just weren't laying around, even in 1985.

What, they had an active social life? They were going to parties?

They were bulky and expensive,

What? CRTs barely shrank from the 1980s until they went out of fashion.

and it probably already had a computer or videogame hooked up to it already.

Oh noes!!11!1!!

Re:TIL

[AK Marc]

TVs were just laying around. And it didn't matter if there was something there. You hooked up to it. One on chan3 and the other on chan4, or 100 things on chan3, no problems, so long as one was on at a time. I had a spare attached to a TV, so if someone brought over a C64 or IIc, it's be a 2 second plug to be up and running. Took longer for the tube to warm up than to hook it up.

Re:TIL

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the "official" bags from SGI for the Indy and O2. Both bags have compartments for a LCD display (I think it's the presenter in both cases). The indy alone weighs about 7kg, I have no Idea how much the whole package including keyboard, mouse, screen and all calbes is. However, while it's no fun lugging it around in public transport, it can be done, so I'd definitively call the whole thing portable.

Re:TIL

[Anonymous Coward]

They also forgot to mention Commodore and the various Z80 processor based personal computers that were out at the time as competition, not IBM. IBM was not their competition for the home front and personal computers, specially if you consider IBM's first attempt at home computing was the PCjr released in 1983, two years AFTER the IIc.

Re:TIL

[MachineShedFred]

Yeah, because it's really hard to unplug the cable from that Atari console and plug it into the Apple II. It requires electricians with union cards and stuff.

Re:TIL

[LeadSongDog]

The Osborne, the original "Compaq portable", the original "IBM Portable", and the Hyperion were all classed as "luggable" by the real people who didn't work for marketting. It was roughly the 20 to 30 pound range (yes, we were still using pounds back then) with a fat-briefcase form factor. The Osborne product was first, but 8-bit g.p. machines were doomed by then. To my mind the Hyperion was the best of them, but they were months too late in the "IBM BIOS compatibility" race and it cost them the business.

Re:TIL

[Plumpaquatsch]

Yeah, because it's really hard to unplug the cable from that Atari console and plug it into the Apple II. It requires electricians with union cards and stuff.

Bah, sophisticated people had one of those combiners, where you plugged in two or more aerial/antenna outputs from your aerial, your VCR and several other devices like computers and game consoles, and had one cable going to your TV, either passive or with a switch to select input. Advanced Electrician's Magic, knowledge now lost to the ages.

Re:TIL

[david_thornley]

You can ignore the Apple ///. Approximately everyone at the time did so.

Re:TIL

[stoatwblr]

My housemate used IIc and other systems by the simple expedient of having one monitor at work and another at home.

He did the same thing years later with a tiny 386-based system, justifying it by pointing out that the entire setup was both more powerful than and half the price of comparable "laptops".

System portability in the days before widespread Internet was _extremely_ useful.

IBM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardly. Unless Apple had a secret mainframe department, the competition for the home computer market was Commodore, Atari, Radio Shack, TI....

Enough with the revisionism already.

my teenage years

[Anonymous Coward]

My second PC language was Zilog assembler, on the trash-80. The CPU got a new life in the Nintendo gameboy and second/third generation of digital organizers. IIRC, the clock speed was increased several times, with Z-80H running at 8 MHz.

Z80 and 68000 were the better architectures

[Anonymous Coward]

I spent several years in the early '80s programming the Z80 and 68000 families in assembler for embedded communications systems. Started with the hardware design and built custom firmware and real time OS. So much more rational and powerful than the Intel "equivalents." Best programming I ever did. Sometimes the good guys don't win.

And as an aside, I had the Intel-based IBM industrial controller machines (960?) that formed the basis of the PC in my research lab in graduate school, built bare metal packet switches based on the TI 56K DSPs, Novix Forth direct-execution chip daughter boards, and some others even more obscure so I got a good look at the chip architectures starting in 1980 through the early 90's.

Re: Z80 and 68000 were the better architectures

[Anonymous Coward]

56K DSP was a Motorola product

And I am interested...

[Anonymous Coward]

because?

Re:And I am interested...

[Anonymous Coward]

it's new for nerds?

I think you're on the wrong site. Try here.

Exxon even beat Star Wars

[turkeydance]

by coming up with a company brand name that sounds like a Star Wars planet.

Re:Federico

[camperdave]

Splitting a statement between the first line and the subject is bad form.

Obligatory Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

When asked to attend an 8:00 AM meeting, the programmer responded that he didn't stay up that late.

Who can forget the Z8000's

[stox]

and ZEUS!

Zilog was a real Unix contender for a while.

Re:Who can forget the Z8000's

[sconeu]

I worked with one of those for about 5 years. Loved it.

We were developing an artillery control system and used a Z8000 as the CPU. We did development on the S8000 under ZEUS.

The Z8000 was really a nice chip. Much nicer than the 286.

Re:Let's Have This Argument Again

[Anonymous Coward]

An Apple is not a Personal Computer. It's like calling all colas a Pepsi.

At the time an Apple would have been called a micro. Now you would probably call it a desktop computer. What it most definitely isn't is a Personal Computer.

More like calling Apple computers Personal Computers is like calling Coke and Pepsi sodas. "Personal Computer" is a generic description, as is "soda".

Re:Let's Have This Argument Again

[msobkow]

You are incorrect. At the time of the Amiga, the Apple II, the Commodore 64, and other such machines, only the IBM PC was a "Personal Computer." It was a brand, not a generic term. The "generic" term was "micro computer".

PC only became a generic term when there was a flood of PC-compatible machines from other vendors on the market. And in response to the genericization of that brand, IBM tried to rebrand their next iteration of machines "Personal System/2", or PS/2, and this time lock things down to prevent competition.

You kids really need to read some old Byte magazines from the period before you go opening your bullshit-spewing mouths.

That was Andy Grove's policy

[Strange Attractor]

If you didn't get in by 8, you had to talk to Andy. Some good engineers stayed away from Intel because of Grove's strictness. In retrospect, it was probably a bad choice. The brains of silicon valley chose silicon when they founded Fairchild Semiconductor and when they moved on to found Intel a decade later, the best move was to follow them. They made some bad and distasteful choices, but overall they were just kind of brilliant and improved the world.

Re:Let's Have This Argument Again

[erice]

You are incorrect. At the time of the Amiga, the Apple II, the Commodore 64, and other such machines, only the IBM PC was a "Personal Computer." It was a brand, not a generic term. The "generic" term was "micro computer".

Microcomputer and "personal computer" (no caps) were used almost interchangeably. They did not mean the same thing though. A personal computer was simply a computer dedicated to a single person. A microcomputer was a computer built around a microprocessor. In principle a microcomputer could be a multi-user and a personal computer could have a multi-chip processor. In this era, though, both were rare.

What you did not encounter was the acronym. Any machine could be a "personal computer" but "PC" was shorthand first for IBM PC and later for "IBM PC clone".

Qyx keyboards

[brausch]

Exxon had the Qyx office systems which competed with Wang word processors before there were PCs. They had the nicest keyboards that I ever used on a typewriter. The feel of the keys was just right for fast, accurate typing. This was around 1979-80.

Z-800?

[calidoscope]

ISTR Z-800 as being the designation for the Z-80 extended to 16 bits. My recollection was that it didn't start shipping until sometime past 1980. If Zilog got the Z-800 out late 1978, and sweet talked DRI to porting CP/M to it, and with that port capable of running Z-80 executables...

Reality was that Intel had announced the 8086 in 1978, had silicon shipping early 1979 and Tim Paterson got an 8086 board up and running in May 1979.

Re:Z-800?

[Anonymous Coward]

Z-8000, 1979, true 16 bit, not an extended Z80 but also not code compatible.
The Z800 was also 16 bit, compatible with the Z80, but it only appeared in 1985.
The Z280 appeared even later and was a Z800 with some improvements.

I never actually worked with any of these, but I've seen a LOT of Z80's (and clones by NEC, among others) pass over my workbench.

They were very popular with manufacturers of big (arcade) video games back then, I remember esp. Sega.

Wonderboy for example was a Z80 based board, although it used a 'copy protected' version, a Z80 embedded in a module along with some external electronics to scramble the instruction set. It was pin compatible with a real Z80, but when the M1 pin of the real Z80 inside indicated that an instruction opcode was being read, the data bus was routed though a ROM that translated the bits so the code from the program ROM couldn't run on a 'naked' Z80.

For later games such as Enduro, Hang-On and OutRun they used a similar system with an 68000 inside, but stuck to a Z-80 as audio controller (controlling one or more synth chips).

Re:Z-800?

[ChrisMaple]

CP/M was a very small OS in 1980. Disassembling it and rewriting for a new processor would be a task of no more than 6 months for a single programmer, and more likely about 2 months. DRI even supplied source code for a sample BIOS.

Re:Homosexuals are destined to Hell

[Anonymous Coward]

Good, so it will be tastefully decorated and the nightlife will be awesome?

Re:Let's Have This Argument Again

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, so link us to some Byte magazines. Google magazine is there for that.

WTF Meeting

[Tablizer]

PHB1: "We have too much money from oil. What are we going to do with it?"

PHB2: "I got it, let's be IBM! Lets make those computer thingamajigs."

PHB1: "Brilliant! I vote we both get a bonus for that idea."

Wha? Hazelwood?

[beheaderaswp]

So the navigation system on the Valdeez was running a Zilog Processor?

Evil oil companies!!!

How to get office drones instead of engineers

[advantis]

From TFS: "Faggin was upset about Intel's new requirement that employees had to arrive by eight in the morning, while he usually worked nights."

I've heard both sides of the story:

Side A: But if you're in the office while everybody else is in, you can work more efficiently, as everybody else is there to answer your questions.
Side B: Some of the best engineers I've worked with worked nights. Some of them slept under their desks and rarely showered, but none of the 9-5 people came close to their performance.

Basically, if people perform don't mess with their schedule or their appearance.

If you're on Side B, Side A also has that negative that is given as a positive: everybody else is there. (sarcastic tone of voice) Yeah!! If you want to not get any work done because of all the "quick" questions everybody has while "headphones" doesn't register with them as "leave me alone!"

Re:How to get office drones instead of engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

Being able to be on time, day to day is pretty important. Especially if you're working in a shift based industry or have turn over meetings.

There is a simple solution to the problem, day shift and night shift.

Day shift should be at there desks by 6am or 8am depending on what industry.
Night shift should be at their desk by 6pm or 8pm.

Now if you have someone that can't make it to whatever set time you need to be in work by, then yeah cut that person loose. Barring legitimate reasons. (If you tell your boss you have depression and still lack the initiative to get medication or see a consoler when your medical takes care of it, its all on you. Compared to say using FMLA.)

I'm not a big fan of name your own work schedule. +/- a few hours is fine. Going to a different shift is fine, if its supported. Coming and going as you please, particularly when others need to COMMUNICATE with you, is problematic.

Re:How to get office drones instead of engineers

[Agripa]

Side A: But if you're in the office while everybody else is in, you can work more efficiently, as everybody else is there to answer your questions.
Side B: Some of the best engineers I've worked with worked nights. Some of them slept under their desks and rarely showered, but none of the 9-5 people came close to their performance

Side C: Being their after hours allows productive work to be done without interruption whether that is by people or sound.

At one place I worked, the boss had the phone system set to ring through to the phone in the lab where I worked so he could hear it. Having my phone ring every few minutes destroyed my productivity so I responded by coming in later and later and staying later and later but it was not enough.

Re:Ah the HD64180

[scsirob]

Hitachi made that sort-of 16-bit processor. It was the HD64180 which was featured in a project from Steve Ciarcia in BYTE magazine (SB-180). Hitachi later sold the rights back to Zilog who produced it as the Z180.

Re:Federico

[Hognoxious]

True, but top-posting is worse

> Splitting a statement between the first line and the
> subject is bad form.

Re:Let's Have This Argument Again

[Anonymous Coward]

Why so serious? Look, if you make shoes and you call just call them 'shoes' and people also call products from other companies 'shoes', then there really isn't much to complain from anyone about shoes being called 'shoes'.

As a side note, what i find funny about USA atleast, maybe even the rest of the english world is, that products are called by one brand name that happens to be succesful. Current example of people calling all tablets 'iPad'.

Re:Let's Have This Argument Again

[msobkow]

What's the matter? You too fucking stupid to Google for yourself?

Re:Let's Have This Argument Again

[msobkow]

"Searching and reading are left as an exercise for the extremely fucking lazy student."

Re:Let's Have This Argument Again

[Anonymous Coward]

You are incorrect. At the time of the Amiga, the Apple II, the Commodore 64, and other such machines, only the IBM PC was a "Personal Computer." It was a brand, not a generic term. The "generic" term was "micro computer".

See this picture of the 1979 Sharp MZ-80K Personal Computer.

"Personal Computer" was a generic term before IBM appropriated it.

The MZ-80K was my first computer, it also had a Z80 CPU.

Engineering is a team activity

[sjbe]

Side A: But if you're in the office while everybody else is in, you can work more efficiently, as everybody else is there to answer your questions.

The benefits of having everyone in the office at the same time is that you can be a more effective team. Engineering is (mostly) a team sport. You have to structure the work environment right so distractions and pointless meetings are minimized otherwise you are setting yourself up for failure. But most important is that you need an environment where the team can work effectively together. For most tasks this requires a non-trivial amount of direct interaction with coworkers. While time shifted teams can work in some cases these are rare and remember that we are talking about a time LONG before the internet was a thing so working separately was far more difficult than it is today. If someone doesn't want to work on an engineering team then either they need to be in a (rare) job where that doesn't matter or they simply aren't going to work out.

Side B: Some of the best engineers I've worked with worked nights. Some of them slept under their desks and rarely showered, but none of the 9-5 people came close to their performance.

That's only helpful if you can do your work without involving anyone else which is extremely unusual. Engineering in most cases is a team activity and it's pretty hard to be an effective team if you have one person (even an extremely talented one) who is never present. In the early days of microprocessor development maybe one guy could do the critical work by himself but that doesn't really work as things get more complex. The long run downside of accommodating prima-donna engineers almost always outweighs the upside of their potential contributions.

Basically, if people perform don't mess with their schedule or their appearance.

My guess is that this guy wouldn't have been able to perform given the team requirements. I don't really care how talented he was, eventually the volume of work will overwhelm even the most talented engineer as the business grows and then he had damn well better be able to play nice with others. Sounds like this guy couldn't.

Re:Engineering is a team activity

[eulernet]

I believe that you have a bias about "ideal teams".

The OP described the 2 profiles that you can find:
Side A: collaborative type
Side B: competitive type

When you work in a collaborative team, everybody unconsciously reduces their effort to a comfortable rhythm for the team.
When you work in a competitive team, everybody do their best, so they work at their own rhythm.

I experienced these 2 extreme environments, and the competitive spirit is the most efficient, BUT the collaborative spirit is more focused on relationships.
I believe a good balance is achievable, but you cannot reject the competitive profiles just because they don't fit your view of an "ideal team".

I'm working right now in a collaborative company, where people spend a lot of time about handshaking and various relationships activities.
But I'm very dissatisfied technically, since outside of relationships, the job is boring.
Before that, I worked at various companies which promoted technical excellence. It was much more interesting technically.

Re:Engineering is a team activity

[Daniel Hoffmann]

What most enlighten companies do is simply "you must be here at least from 2pm to 5pm", and everybody just schedule meetings and face-to-face at those hours. People telecommuting will often see demands like that in the job description.

Re:Engineering is a team activity

[ChrisMaple]

In 40 years of electronic engineering design work, time spent in necessary communications with others was on the order of 1 hour a month. Generally, time spent talking or listening is time spent not working.

Re:Engineering is a team activity

[david_thornley]

Engineering isn't usually done by intense collaboration for eight-plus hours a day. There is a need for solitary time, or at least small-group time, and so if we schedule all the all-hands collaboration at well-chosen times we can accommodate people coming in at a fairly wide range of times. This does not mean you want an engineer going off in some weird direction without supervision or collaboration, but that you don't need to have everybody on the exact same schedule. This is useful, since not all people work best at the same times.

Software people, anyway, have a fairly clear idea of stuff that helps them do quality work, and stuff that doesn't, and they tend to be rather intolerant of requirements that don't, in their opinion, help their work. Nowadays, if you impose a dress code on your software people, or a rigid schedule, you'll have problems attracting and retaining good people.

Re:Let's Have This Argument Again

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't call my android tablet an ipad, I call it a nexus or tablet. I've never heard anyone calling all tablets an ipad, or am I behind the times with teenagers now?

Anyway you caught me mid hoovering.... pass me my walkman so I can drown out this thread.

There is no single correct team structure

[sjbe]

I believe that you have a bias about "ideal teams".

Disagree. The ideal team structure for a situation can vary greatly depending on the task at hand and the personalities involved. I make no judgement about what is ideal for a given situation and I've seen a wide variety of team structures work effectively. But what is VERY clear is that having a single individual, no matter how talented, doing something wildly different than the rest of the organization is almost always a recipe for failure. There are exceptions that prove the rule but they are rather rare.

Thanks to the internet it is easier today to have teams time and location shifted particularly if the task is something like software that can be readily broken up in to manageable pieces. But that is relatively rare. My company is a manufacturer and it would be nearly impossible for us to work effectively at different times of day and in different locations.

The OP described the 2 profiles that you can find:
Side A: collaborative type
Side B: competitive type

That grossly oversimplifies the reality of the situation. Things involving real people rarely fall neatly into one of two buckets no matter how much you might wish it were so.

worse than you think

[itchybrain]

I have heard that in the Penang (Malaysia) site, the director at Intel is known to take attendance after 9am.

Re:Let's Have This Argument Again

[Plumpaquatsch]

You are incorrect. At the time of the Amiga, the Apple II, the Commodore 64, and other such machines, only the IBM PC was a "Personal Computer." It was a brand, not a generic term. The "generic" term was "micro computer".

You disagree with IBM then, who called the IBM PC "the IBM of Personal Computers" in one of the introducing ads. Which only makes sense if there were other Personal Computers before. http://s7.computerhistory.org/is/image/CHM/500004393-03-01?$re-medium$

Re:Z-8000

[Anonymous Coward]

Rodney Zaks wrote a great book on programming the Z-8000 (called, "Programming the Z-8000"). A terrific way for a casual user like me to gain some insights into MPU operation. I really enjoyed that book.
Olivetti, IIRC, actually shipped a computer based on the Z-8000, but only a few. The Z-8000 was rumored to have a lot of bugs and needed a lot of hardware workarounds to get it to be functional. CPU development seems to be a business for the quick and the dead, and the zilog dev team apparently wasn't quick...