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