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Getting on the PC Bus

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      I n my first year in Long Island, an announcement of a press conference in the city about a new PC interface –the Universal Serial Bus (USB) – grabbed my attention. Always hungry to be in the froth of Manhattan, I jumped at the chance to go. Despite the long drive on bad freeways – some potholes were nearly as big as my car – and the difficulty finding parking even at ridiculous prices, I was elated. I felt like I was travelling into the center of the universe. The event drew me closer to the inner circle of the rising partnership of Microsoft and Intel that the press dubbed Wintel. All I recall of that press conference today is meeting Carl Stork, Microsoft’s liaison to the hardware world. I imagined Carl was Bill Gates’ older brother. They both had mops of over-the-collar blonde hair, oversized glasses and thin, high-pitched voices. Unlike Bill, no strand of Carl’s hair was ever out of place, and his voice was measured, absent Bill’s adolescent squeak. In a me...
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They Called Him Mr. USB

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      T he head of the USB initiative at Intel was Jim Pappas (below), a gentle giant at six-foot-seven who seemed to always have a joke or anecdote handy. Jim was a rare combination, a chip engineer and a people person. He had spent four years designing at Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) a single chip processor for its popular (but quickly becoming passe) Vax minicomputers. His good work won him an offer to design one of the new Alpha CPUs DEC was working on to rival Intel’s x86. But Jim didn’t want to spend another four years with his head buried in the details of processor microarchitecture; he wanted to work with people. So, he took on another job: rallying DEC’s engineers around a new bus, a digital channel for linking processors. It would replace four different buses DEC had designed solely for its own systems. Early on in the work, “someone on my team met with Intel and said they had a new bus that could revolutionize what we were doing at DEC,” Jim told me over ...
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Lumbering toward multimedia

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      M ost of the tech news around the PC in the mid 1990’s centered on what we called multimedia. In those days, PC audio was like a bowl of Rice Crispies, full of snaps, crackles and pops. Graphics were often blurry or would get rendered as checkerboards of pixels, and even postage-stamp-sized videos were virtually unplayable. There was excited talk about connecting the PC to the phone to take and manage calls or even run office telephone exchange systems, but it, too, was pie in the sky. The PC was something of a lumbering klutz when it came to handling what engineers called real-time services like audio and video. Not only was the Windows operating system too slow, PCs weren’t designed for the kind of millisecond response times such services required. Critics, including Ron Wilson, said the multimedia problem was just another sign of the software bloat that was Windows and the overall lack of sophistication in the PC architecture. Users were accustomed to phone...
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Sunny Days, Setting Standards

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      I n the wake of USB’s initial success, Jim got a call from Pat Gelsinger, the manager of Intel’s desktop group, its largest corporate division. “USB was the most brilliantly run tech initiative ever in the computer industry,” Jim said that Gelsinger told him.   “Here’s what you’re going to do next: Come work for me, hire ten Jim Pappas-es, and run my top tech initiatives.” “There were no question marks on that phone call,” Jim said, just an expectation the gentle giant would pick up a broader, heavier set of jobs. He did. Under Gelsinger, Jim led a whopping 77 standards initiatives before his retirement in 2024. I covered a handful of them, stepping stones in the PC’s evolution. Initially, they were about fast buses for multimedia. Jim also hosted biennial invite-only meetings for engineers where Intel rolled out the next steps on its PC roadmap. Like PCI and USB, it had a no-frills name, the Industry Roadmap Update Meeting (IRUM). Reporters never got...
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The PC Gets Overheated

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      B efore long, cracks began to appear. CPUs had advanced to run at speeds of a gigahertz-plus, 25x their rate from my Hong Kong days, but it couldn’t last. Gelsinger gave an IDF talk about a sharp curve ahead in the roadmap. Chips can’t keep getting smaller, faster, cheaper. Or at least they couldn’t keep getting faster. They were getting too hot. On their current trajectory he said, showing a chart, they would give off as much heat as the surface of the sun in a couple decades. It wasn’t the end, of course. CPUs switched to becoming silicon buckets of multiple small processor cores working together, like a network of tiny computers on a chip. That and many other advances continue to keep semiconductors advancing every year or two, though now at a statelier pace. Over time, the friction and heat turned up on the business side, too. It became increasingly clear that –if at all possible -- Intel would quickly absorb any new PC hardware functions into CPUs and their chi...
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A lesson in ethics

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      I ronically as PCs became more useful and user friendly, the industry became less interesting to cover. It was sad. It was easy to blame Intel and Microsoft, but in some ways, it was just business, the cold heart of capitalism. And I was not exactly a paragon of virtue. As the PC guy, I felt pressure to get a big lead story in the run up to Comdex. I worked my sources, including one hard working senior engineer at Acer, at the time Taiwan’s biggest branded maker of PCs. I’ll call him Freddy. I had been cultivating a relationship with him for months over coffee, dinner, whatever. As Comdex neared, I peppered him with all sorts of questions on everything I knew or thought might be going on. Somewhere along the line he mentioned something that pricked up my reporter’s ears: His CEO, Stan Shih, was going to meet at Comdex with Apple’s then-CEO, Michael Spindler. Shih aimed to convince Spindler to give him a license to make clones of Macintosh computers as a path...
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Post mortem for the PC

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      I n the end, we got really great PCs. The laptop I type these words on routinely handles video calls with friends and family around the world. I watch whole movies on it. I use online utilities to record and edit my music with it (my retirement hobby). It fits in a large manila envelope, costs a few hundred bucks and has two ports to handle its every external need. And yes -- take a bow, Jim -- they are USB. Annual PC sales leapt from less than 20 million a year when I started covering the industry in 1988 to peaks of more than 300 million a year since 2000. The PC became tech’s first giant consumer phenomenon. More than two billion systems are in use around the globe today. But that was just the warm up. At the time we knew something big would come from mobile computing, but we never guessed just how pervasive or transformative it might be. As early as 1999, folks started talking about a post-PC era though it was far from clear what that might look like. In...
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