Replies to post #134681 on Intel Corp (INTC)

[Tim May]

Thanks for your words, mmoy, but I post only occasionally.

I was pretty active for a couple of years on Silicon Investor, circa about the late 1990s, early 2000s.

Frankly, most of my postings on various sites (many) are longer than the usual repartee which Twitter and other other websites have made so popular.

I mentally filter posting of two or three lines which contain words like LMFAO, LOL, fanboys, etc. They are almost always just schoolyard taunts.

And just since I retired, in 1986 ("just since" is meant ironically) I've seen a shortening of message lengths, an increase in snippy, snarky, bullshit comments, and an absence of content.

Without boring folks with historical cruft, I've been involved in various ways with math-based currency systems for a lot of years. Google if interested.

But in recent years, especially the past 18 months, even the Bitcoin fora are swamped with "one line repartee." Twitters from twats.

Satoshi, whomever he is, did not develop his version of Bitcoin by huddling with the other wannabes and by doing a consensus. He thought deeply, and probably in relative isolation. And yet now hundreds of thousands are tweeting each other on ephemera, on bullshit "LMFAO!" versions of Gen Y uptalk about these issues.

Intel now faces issues. When has it been different? I remember when the "dollar devices" was a pressing, even existential, issue for Intel. "TI can make devices for under a dollar. Why can't we?" (1975)

Then the Japanese threat: Hitachi, Fujitsu, NEC, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Matsushita, etc. Had this site been active in 1978-1988, I think it would've been dominated by this topic.

And of course there was the RISC vs. CISC debate.

And don't forget the Apple-IBM-Motorola alliance to develop an alternative to the Intel CPUs.

And so on. The latest Intel vs. ARM is just another version. I'm not saying who will win, or who _should_ win, just pointing out the battles are familiar.

And why the same old same old same old of name calling, and "yo mama" and LMFAO and LOL and other taunts are no more interesting or useful than they were in the Intel/AMD war which raged for the whole time I was on Silicon Investor and (obviously) well into recent times.

The more interesting questions are about the economics of building $10 billion per fabs to support 14nm, 10nm, etc. Merely citing "more slaw" (joke) is not very interesting or useful.


--Tim May, Corralitios, CA, worked for Intel 1974-86, other things since then