61–70 of 179 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gates also is known for having built a home that stood out. It's not about the era its about the person.
It is extravagant but hardly stands out. You can only see it by boat if you already know where to look.
I'm sorry to hear of his passing. My first job in the Bay Area was working for Intel in Santa Clara, and I worked in the same building that Andy did at the time (Santa Clara 4). It amazed me that he had a cubical (well it had slightly higher walls but was still just a cube.) I have two very influential memories of my time at Intel, the first was when I went to a design update meeting on the 80386 and Andy locked the…
Thinking about it and "second sourcing", it is funny how not that long afterwards they used marketing tactics like the 486SX/487SX fiasco to compete with AMD's 386DX. I wonder what would have happened if for example Intel bought Compaq instead back in 1991 (instead of Compaq having to cut R&D for example).
Andy was a driving force behind that shift, his view that "only the paranoid survive" was that you had to believe everyone was out to get you in order to avoid surprises from your "friends." And as much as I hate to admit it, he was correct in that view.
I'm sorry to hear of his passing. My first job in the Bay Area was working for Intel in Santa Clara, and I worked in the same building that Andy did at the time (Santa Clara 4). It amazed me that he had a cubical (well it had slightly higher walls but was still just a cube.) I have two very influential memories of my time at Intel, the first was when I went to a design update meeting on the 80386 and Andy locked the…
I recall asking the question then "why can't we stack cores on top of each other" and being told by very senior engineers how stupid that idea was...
Working at Intel was actually the golden age of my gaming experience; I worked in the game development lab and played video games to test SIMD extensions 18 hours a day.
I recall going out to a balcony in SC5 and having a cigarette, there was some person from finance there, and after chatting with him for a bit I asked why he was working so late; he was trying to figure out how to recode the finance system to add additional spaces to the finance DB to allow for the many billions they had in the bank. Apparently the fields were initially set too short to handle the numbers as large as they were dealing with...
Andy was an incredible person.
From Wikipedia, >Grove's office was an 8-ft by 9-ft cubicle like the other employees, as he disliked separate "mahogany-paneled corner offices." He states, "I've been living in cubicles since 1978 — and it hasn't hurt a whole lot." Preferring this egalitarian atmosphere, he thereby made his work area accessible to anyone who walked by. There were no reserved parking spaces, and Grove parked wherever there was a space…
It seems like early Intel and HP higher ups were more in tune with egalitarianism as well not being aloof or unapproachable. The Moore foundation has been an amazing charity. Here in Santa Cruz, Andy Grove built a house out on one of the streets near the beach between Santa Cruz and Capitola. He worked with neighbors (according to local press) to not be out of place in the design, etc. Contrast that with Zuckerberg a…
Ellison's 200 million dollar house set on 23 acres, suggests that selective memory might be playing a role.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thinking about it and "second sourcing", it is funny how not that long afterwards they used marketing tactics like the 486SX/487SX fiasco to compete with AMD's 386DX. I wonder what would have happened if for example Intel bought Compaq instead back in 1991 (instead of Compaq having to cut R&D for example).
One of the reasons I left Intel for Sun was that Intel had just realized that "lots of people" making x86 chips was a bad thing for their control of the market. There were no less than 6 suppliers of 8086 chips. But with the 80286 and the 80386 it became clear that "owning the processor" so that they could claim a big chunk of the profit on every PC sold was very very important to the company. That strategy, while un…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like early Intel and HP higher ups were more in tune with egalitarianism as well not being aloof or unapproachable. The Moore foundation has been an amazing charity. Here in Santa Cruz, Andy Grove built a house out on one of the streets near the beach between Santa Cruz and Capitola. He worked with neighbors (according to local press) to not be out of place in the design, etc. Contrast that with Zuckerberg a…
"Maybe it was just a different time." Ellison's 200 million dollar house set on 23 acres, suggests that selective memory might be playing a role.
Now he has a 600mm fucking island of the STATE of Hawaii!!
PBS did a great documentary "Silicon Valley"[1] (not to be confused with the show), which I highly recommend. It tells the amazing story of how Robert Noyce, Arthur Rock, Gordon Moore, and Andrew Grove were absolute pioneers and insanely gifted. A huge loss. Here is the first 15 minutes of the documentary on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcOoQP7nhl4
The effect of Grove's talent was only made obvious when he retired and the company started to drift seriously sideways with their forays into VLIW and stupidly deep instruction pipelines. His ability to steer a company through what was perpetual chaos against relentless competitors is almost unparalleled. They didn't have it easy like Microsoft did where they were virtually the only game in town. They almost lost the…
Not to take anything away from Grove, but a lot of the focus on deep instruction pipelines can probably be traced to certain software partners being concerned about scaling across multi-core.
As for VLIW/Itanium, I expect some of the same motivations were in play--plus, a desire to reset and lock-out the various x86 clone makers.
Grove's High Output Management is highly recommended. It's a masterpiece of management theory and practice. http://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove/dp...
One thing that struck me as emblematic of Grove's generous and effective management style is that nowhere in the book does he have a section addressing the difficult task of letting people go. I kept waiting for it. Instead, he focuses on the challenge of retaining talent stating that's the toughest job management confronts.
The book made me really wish I worked for an organization he was in charge of.