I wish more Intel people would share their backgrounds. (I guess the choice of pseodonyms signals their non-desire to share actual backgrounds.)
I can't even begin to guess who Koog may be, especially as I left Intel in 1986. And even more especially as I hadn't been much more than tangentially involved in micrrocontrollers. I later came to know John Wharton, who had been a principal in the 8051 and other chips. I met him after we had both left Intel (at an Artificial Life conference in Los Alamos in 1987...we remained in contact throught Bay Area activitied, the Hackers Conference. etc.)
Myself, I started at Intel in1974 in Technology Development on a 2-layer-metal project, was transferred when a massive reliability problem threatnened to sink the company (moisture inside CerDIP, ceramic dual-inline packages), and was then formally transferred into the Reliability Engineering department in 1975.
The guy who hired me for his 2-layer metal team in 1974 wss Craig Barrett, who led the "CerDIP Reliability Task Force" in 1974-75, and who then returned from Stanford in around early 1976 to be the official head of Reliability Engineering. Craig showed no favoritism, but he was always appreciateive of basic physics, basic metallurgy (which I had to come up to speed on very quickly), and, most of all, solid reasoning.
For a guy like me, dealing with Craig as my boss (well, I was two levels below him, so there was some guy in between) was very good. We talked in terms of contact angles, phase diagrams, basic experiments, and then alpha particles, ionization tracks, and critical charge.
I eventually left in 1986 when things got so big, when the burrowocracy [SIC] got so big, when people like me were being sanctioned for our expressed politics, and when I decided I had already saved up enough "Fuck You" money to say "Hast la Vista, Baby!
I have followed Intel closely since then, at a safe 30-mile distance, because much of my wealth remains in the Intel shares I bought between 1974 and 1986.
I wish them well. But I am very happy I was very far from that corporate culture for the past 29 years.
If I hadn't quit in 1986 I expect various of the "Human Relations" Nazi feministas would've taken me down by 1989 at the latest.
--Tim
