Intel Headquarters (aka SC4) 1983-1984 Greg BryantI was hired into Intel as a Unix guru with microprocessor expertise -- by a sharp, and ultimately successful, insurgent group at Intel's global headquarters in Santa Clara. Like many guerilla groups, they had many supporters among the oppressed people, and even some secret comrades up the management ladder. This insurgency, and other tempests in a teapot, took place mostly on the top floor of a rather small two-story building. This action had world-changing consequences only because of the vast monies and energies focused on this particular engine, Intel, within the computer industry. The executives who founded Intel were not influential because they were brilliant. They were successful because they'd been seduced by a drive to 'win', and took extreme advantage of opportunities to grow their portfolios of technology, power, and finance. They built armies to served the establishment. They happily helped to grow the US empire, no matter the cost to the world. They sucked up the brightest people and nature's precious resources for nothing but power and profit, justified by collective delusions of human progress. They weren't the only ones deluded in this way. The 20th and 21st centuries have been full of uninhibited tech daddies, a fate I managed to turn away from, but whose temptations I felt quite clearly. If you look at it in a totally selfish light, becoming a tech plutocrat seems like the only liberation available, in a world of alienation produced by extreme capitalism which, at that point, had already been extreme for a hundred years. Today, everyone is becoming aware that capitalist industrialism is burning the planet. Gordon Moore, famous for setting the pace for this destruction, was the CEO, and he would stalk the floor restlessly. He'd regularly pull a mildly displeased face at me for purposefully not wearing my badge ... but he would not tell me to put it on. At that point, he wasn't completely sure if badges were a sufficiently important issue to lose a good engineer over. That would change. Everyone at Intel was working too hard. And they suffocated in an impossibly bureaucratic, autocratic, and sterile office-political atmosphere. It was managerial, hierarchical, irrational, and dull. Unions were forbidden, and co-operation, even for the good of the company, was covert. There was a patronizing, soul-sucking marketing campaign to teach everyone the 'Intel culture'. A culture where creativity, innovation, opportunity, and humanity, were stifled at every turn. Luckily, my immediate co-workers agreed with this assessment: that secret rebel group. The engineering challenges were certainly consuming. We found a new way of producing microprocessors, while stitching together computing power to do the work. The 80386 wouldn't have been buildable without Unix -- itself a covert project within a different tyrannical corporation -- as well as countless notions borrowed from the world of software. This work required tireless, diligent reasoning, systems-level engineering, and bug-killing. Here's a typical email from one of the rebels: a 22-year-old Pat Gelsinger. I served as a technical consultant for a corporate-wide migration of engineering to Unix, pushed by the rebels. I was constantly offering ideas, making observations, and debating, alongside a nauseatingly unproductive and unsubtle divide-and-conquer mechanism promulgated by the executive management: 'constructive confrontation'. Which was only confrontation, and never constructive. Still, it wasn't hard for us to win these arguments, because we were borrowing many successful software principles and deploying them for the first time to chip engineering. All that is laudable, but most of my time at Intel was spent working with Gelsinger and others to cobble together a custom heterogenous network of Unix machines to improve our computing performance, to move the 386/'P3' project forward:
Although there were certainly brilliant people at Intel, the insanity of the organization itself drove me crazy by osmosis. I resigned in the middle of an additional storm of stupidity from the outside, when IBM had decided that 32-bit computers (including the 386) were overpowered for desktop machines, and so they wouldn't be using the chip at all! They also saw no merit in the microprocessor group's work on the backwards-compatibility of executable software, for which we forcefully advocated, a lesson learned in part from portability issues that arose in the unix world (I was a C portability consultant prior to this job, so I longed for compatible hardware advancements). These simple ideas were not yet on the radar of the establishment executives. Desperate, Pat Gelsinger and three senior rebels took me out to lunch, after I gave my notice. In the tradition of Intel's 'renegades' -- who left one startup to start another, and left that one to start Intel -- they begged me to start a super-rational company, building 32-bit machines with the 386 after it was released, that could run all known software -- and then hire them away from Intel! They were appealing to various arguments I'd made over my time there, including the need to demerit technologies that survived just because they were proprietary. But deep down, they just thought I'd be a fun CEO, because I don't believe that anyone should imagine they could 'manage people'. Instead, everyone must work together to manage a project, and if possible, to define it. Because that's what happens in successful projects anyway. It's better to blow away the whiff of autocracy and get on with it. But, I asked them: Why help Intel out of its stupor? Why take advantage of an obtuse IBM? Why promulgate computing at all? It's a dirty business, making chips and boxes, despite its cultivated post-industrial image. We were all fighting in the industry, but we weren't fighting to stop it. Is that doing the right thing? We fought out of frustration, and a sense of injustice, because we were at the bottom, and the people at the bottom know better than the people at the top. We were drawn to the technical problem of forcing 'business people', and even former engineers like our executives, to understand reality. But was that worthwhile? There's no right answer. It depends on the situation, of course. But we need to discuss it. I also told them that, based on the examples I'd seen, I might become a worse person if I was to become a CEO. So I said no. So, they all stayed at Intel, and fought. Compaq decided to take that risk on the 386. The rebel project I'd helped for nearly two years ultimately became the most influential computer chip in history: the 80386, the microprocessor inspired by unix software practices. And, after several exits and returns, Pat Gelsinger is CEO of Intel now.
Above: Early Internet email gymnastics. In 1983, Pat Gelsinger offers his account to Greg Bryant so he could correspond with people on unix's informal uucpnet, the largest network of computers at the time. This is months after the Internet's adoption of TCP/IP.