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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 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.
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.
Z80s are still being manufactured and still in use all over the place, just not so's you'd see them.
First, a correction:
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:
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.
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 :)
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.
When asked to attend an 8:00 AM meeting, the programmer responded that he didn't stay up that late.
and ZEUS!
Zilog was a real Unix contender for a while.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
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.
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
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.
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.
"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it." - George Santayana
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.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
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."
Table-ized A.I.
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
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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$
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.