Sunny Days, Setting Standards

     In 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 invited to these events held under strict non-disclosure agreements. But we always tried to figure out when and where they were so we could pester our best sources for leaks. Jim organized 53 IRUMs at Intel over the course of his career.

In the early days of the PC, IRUM attendance was a sign of being part of the in-crowd. Later, it would feel a bit like a death march as Wintel defined ever-expanding parts of the PC and took increasingly large chunks of the profits the industry generated while system makers consolidated or went out of business and increasingly felt like metal benders, distribution companies living on razor-thin margins.

But even in 2025 at an event celebrating his retirement, Jim remained irrepressibly upbeat. “They depended on us for leadership,” he said, referring to PC makers at the IRUM events.

That was true, for a while at least. The 90’s were the PC’s day in the sun, literally. Awash in a rising pool of profits, Intel launched an annual public event to rally the industry around its products. The Intel Developer Forum (IDF) debuted in 1997 in Palm Springs.

EE Times was doing great, too. We reporters could fly there and almost anywhere we could convince Wallace that we expected to get good stories. It was seen as better to request a trip and get turned down then to fail to ask and miss a big story. Once, I pitched and got the OK to fly to Cancun to cover one of the largest medical electronics conferences. The stories were just OK, but the snorkeling was excellent.

I recall hanging out poolside at IDF Palm Springs with Lammers and a laundry list of Intel execs, including Gelsinger, we interviewed on the tech issues of the day. An engineer at heart, Gelsinger was happy to grant us time. He had led the design of the 486, a hugely successful chip that made him Intel’s golden boy. He was genuinely enthusiastic about technology, the PC and the rocket Intel was riding as one of the world’s largest and fastest growing chip makers.

Gelsinger at IDF as Intel CTO circa 2002

Engineers loved Gelsinger, too. Years after he left Intel after being passed over for the CEO role, he keynoted Hot Chips, a gathering at Stanford of the inner circle of Silicon Valley microprocessor architects. Though he had become a software executive at VMWare and even wore a suit at the keynote (anathema to working hardware engineers in the 90’s), the crowd hung on his every word.

Our time at IDF in Palm Springs marked a heady peak moment with drinks poolside and wide-ranging interviews about technology with the likes of Gelsinger and his peers.

Back in Manhasset, I was filing out the pages of OEM Magazine with features about the PC as a telephone switch, or tomorrow’s video phone or the next you-name-it. These features weren’t cover stories by any means, more like what my old Hong Kong boss Peter Brindisi called “think pieces.” I was half drunk on the new technologies and applications Gates and Intel execs rolled out on a regular cadence.

Next: The PC Gets Overheated