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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."
I still remember hoping the successors would make some headway. LSI-11, MC68000, Z-80 all proof that evolution doesn't select for excellence.
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.
Splitting a statement between the first line and the subject is bad form.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
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.
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.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
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!"
Question for religious people: where do unrepentant masochists go when they die?
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.