I guess this is worth seeing...

Back when I worked at AOL I had some great coworkers. One of them has since gone back to Kansas to work there. He was touring California on vacation, spending a few hours with each of his many friends and relatives in the state. We decided to take in the Intel Museum in Santa Clara, that being something we could probably both enjoy.

Am I surprised that they forgot to mention the work going on at Texas Instruments at the same time? Anyhow, that was followed by some stuff that explained something about what a semiconductor is.

To put it simply, it's something that sort of conducts electricity. The added feature that makes semiconductors powerful tools is that you can control how good their conducting properties are with electrical signals.

The 4004 was the first CPU chip good enough to power a low level personal computer. At that point in time it was just something hobbyists and industrial control people were interested in.

Robert remembered working on something like this at that time. The closest to something like that I remember was setting the boot switches on a PDP-11-35 at Bradley when turning on the computer there. I programmed assembly language in many different environments, but not by typing it in on a control panel! Downloading via paper tape or by programming EPROMs was how I did it.

I first became familiar with PCs in 1983ish, when working at Sente. We still used a minicomputer to do the heavy lifting of compiling and assembling code, but more and more PCs were taking over. It started when they started using PCs as terminals, which gave the desktop machines a lot more capability to explore.

Robert spent these years doing disk I/O controllers and such. For me, those were test equipment and user interface software years.

In 1991 the Gulf War sent a spasm of questions like "what can we do to make the economy more energy efficient?" through Silicon Valley. One of the ideas that surfaces then was teleconferencing. Intel participated in that by making "video conferencing cameras". Nowadays it seems like every mobile phone with a camera comes with this capability, but back then it was a fascinating new idea.

It's hard for me to miss the elemental sound of Intel's more recent product names. Xeon even looks a lot like Xenon. I consider Helium and Neon much more valuable Nobel gasses, for whatever that's worth. Before the pentium came out Intel's CPUs were 8086, 80186, 80286, 80386, 80486. I was expecting the pentium to be an 80586. I heard the marketing people considered following the numerical sequence that too predictable. My question is, is there such a thing as too predictable? For what it's worth, I still think it's predictable that Helium is chemically inert in most situations you or I are likely to see. Xenon is slightly less inert, but still not usually dangerous. The predictablity of a Xeon, on the other hand, depends a lot on the quality of the hardware and software system it is part of. This can be less than ideal.