gopherloafers

I started at intel in 1988 and loved working there up until about 2005. The author of this article did a fantastic job enumerating the number of launched products, but there were twice as many that were cancelled. It became such a clusterfuck of leaders vying for promotion to bigger projects and taking over flailing ones only to can them after a year. The 80s and 90s were hyper efficient and focused on churning out clear roadmaps. But the fragmentation of the market was something intel couldn’t handle: its platform didn’t cover all segments no matter how hard it tried it couldn’t do everything. I think the market is still reconverging after all the segmentation. The term “ubiquitous computing” was thrown around a lot in 2000, and it finally happened but it is arm that won. I think there will be a reconvergence of personal computing platforms and I can’t wait to see who vacuums up all the little guys. But after reading this, damn I missed launching the 486 and Pentium. Those were some of the best days of my career.

Not OP, but In 1983 I was 13 and I won a scholarship to a summer camp that rented space in a rich kid prep school for computer camp. I learned pascal over two weeks and the following summer I went back and learned assembly. Three years later I built a 286 and fortunately lived near the Yale bookstore and it had a book on 286 assembly. Basically being a middle class kid adjacent to rich people is how I learned assembly at a young age. If it wasn’t for that camp I wouldn’t have learned computer architecture, logic, and assembly until college. Zip code matters.

But once you run out, will you screw the community over or eat the costs?

Since Covid? Since the 1990s when P/E ratios in tech started to hit the high 20s and 30s. What was “crazy” back then is de rigeur now, and even paltry.

Stephen Jenkinson, author of Die Wise and founder of the School of Orphan Wisdom speaks a lot about this. The “wretched anxiety” he observed as head of palliative care in Canada he claims stems from fear of being forgotten. Which is tied to a particular Western failure: not honoring our elders who have died, and the amnesia of cultural memory. His book is a good read, and I think provides an alternative account to the points made in this article.