Intel's longtime President and CEO Andy Grove has died. He was 79, and was Intel's first hire. Born in pre-war Hungary, he survived both the Nazi occupation and Communist rule to immigrate to America at the age of 20.
Present at Intel's 1968 founding with Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, Andy Grove became Intel's President in 1979 and CEO in 1987. He served as Chairman of the Board from 1997 to 2005. Both during his time at Intel and in retirement, Grove was one of the most influential figures in technology and business, writing best-selling books and widely cited articles, and speaking out on an array of prominent public issues.
"We are deeply saddened by the passing of former Intel Chairman and CEO Andy Grove," said Intel CEO Brian Krzanich. "Andy made the impossible happen, time and again, and inspired generations of technologists, entrepreneurs, and business leaders."
Grove played a critical role in the decision to move Intel's focus from memory chips to microprocessors and led the firm's transformation into a widely recognized consumer brand. Under his leadership Intel produced the chips, including the 386 and Pentium, which helped usher in the PC era. The company also increased annual revenues from $1.9 billion to more than $26 billion.
Wikipedia and Wikiquote have more background:
Technology will always win. You can delay technology by legal interference, but technology will flow around legal barriers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 22 2016, @01:47AM
Well, I guess nobody is a natural born leader, but he was close... not for the faddish "Web 2.0" industry though. "High Output Management", his first book, is a good read.
(Score: 4, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday March 22 2016, @02:03AM
No. That would have been their 8088. By the time the 386 came out, they were already deeply entrenched in the PC era.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 22 2016, @02:14AM
"including" the 386 and the Pentium, so they weren't wrong.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday March 22 2016, @02:17AM
My point was it didn't usher in the PC era. The PC era was already comfortably seated by the time the 386 came out.
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Tuesday March 22 2016, @02:46AM
It was the first 32 bit IBM-compatible processor, no? We still live with many of its design decisions today.
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 22 2016, @01:31PM
I think his point was the IBM PC era.
At the time it was not clear which way it was going to go. I happened to *guess* correctly it was IBMPC clones. With the right deals here and there it could have easily gone to commodore or apple, with their Motorola cores.
I think we are seeing another change of CPU architecture. Oh x86 is not going away by any means (too many of them out there). But ARM is where all the cool kids play these days.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday March 22 2016, @04:44AM
Was the Intel 4004, used by the Busicom calculator - the first "Intel Inside" ?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 22 2016, @08:18AM
The 4004 wasn't their first product. They were already making memory. They didn't start using the "Intel inside" slogan until the 1990s, as I recall.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 22 2016, @02:48AM
When Grove was running Intel along with Gordon Moore (yes, that Moore), Intel was taking a beating from Japanese competition on DRAM chips, which was their flagship.
Finally Grove looked at Moore and said, "Gordon, if the board kicked us out and hired new people to run the company, what would they do?"
Moore: "Oh, it's obvious. They'd get us out of memories."
Grove: "Well, then why don't you and I do that and save the board the trouble."
So Grove and Moore symbolically "resigned" by leaving the office together, riding down the elevator and stepping outside. Then they turned around and came back, and started working on the plan to get Intel out of DRAMs so it could focus on CPU chips.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 22 2016, @03:51AM
This is from the introduction to the revised version of "High Output Management" in 1995; note that this was before the Internet was "a thing", but after globalization and "reengineering the corporation" (i.e. downsizing) became widespread. Grove's intended audience was middle managers, but this part pretty much applies to everyone:
I recently read an article saying that middle-aged men are twice as likely to lose their jobs today than they were in 1980, fifteen years ago. This trend is going to increase in the years ahead.
As a general rule, you have to accept that no matter where you work, you are not an employee— you are in a business with one employee: yourself. You are in competition with millions of similar businesses. There are millions of others all over the world, picking up the pace, capable of doing the same work that you can do and perhaps more eager to do it. Now, you may be tempted to look around your workplace and point to your fellow workers as rivals, but they are not. They are outnumbered— a thousand to one, one hundred thousand to one, a million to one. by people who work for organizations that compete with your firm. So if you want to work and continue to work, you must continually dedicate yourself to retaining your individual competitive advantage.
In a slow or no-growth environment, there is another factor that you have to contend with as well: ambitious junior employees who desire to move upward in the organization. They may very well be ready to do so but can’t because you’re in the way. Sooner or later, your boss will inevitably have to make a choice: whether to hold on to you, who is doing a good job but is in the way of another person. The responsibility to avoid such situations is yours.
The recipe for success for the generation of managers who worked in the sixties, seventies, and much of the eighties was to join stable and enlightened companies and help them do well; these companies in turn would reward such managers with a career. Obviously, that is no longer the case.
The point is, the clichés of globalization and the information revolution have real meaning—potentially deadly meaning— for your career. The sad news is, nobody owes you a career. You own it as a sole proprietor. You must compete with millions of individuals every day, and every day you must enhance your value, hone your competitive advantage, learn, adapt, get out of the way, move from job to job, even from industry to industry if you must and retrench if you need to do so in order to start again. The key task is to manage your career so that you do not become a casualty.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 22 2016, @08:37AM
Well, thank God! one less person to compete with now
(Score: 2) by dltaylor on Tuesday March 22 2016, @09:02AM
People may not know, or may have forgotten, that Intel is only where where they are today because back in the 70s, they were failing miserably.
The 8080 was dog slow, and very inefficient (the NEC V20 was pin and opcode compatible, but significantly faster). About the only thing they well, at the time, was their EPROM line.
What saved Intel was a decision by IBM purchasing to nix the choice of a really sweet little CPU, the Zilog Z8000, because Intel was so desperate for business that they would practically give the 8088 away. The Z8000 had a register set like the 360 (8 orthogonal registers), and could run more powerful OS, like UNIX Version 6. Engineering wanted that one, but IBM would have had no significant leverage on a company owed by an oil company that could buy countries (Exxon).
So, instead of good CPUs proliferating, we have the architecture of a piece of junk that was about the worst possible that could still run at all.