11:30am, Monday 28 April 2003
I saw this re-posted on a newsgroup; the original was written in November 1999. Still a bit depressing.
I was at Intel when the 8086 was under development. Few people know that it was never meant to be a product; it was a test architecture from the lab that was trotted out frantically to kill design-in deals for the upcoming Z8000, which with its DEC- like symmetric register architecture was thought to be a revolutionary product. Then Zilog released the Z8000 with bugs, and the 8086 went out with its perverse segmentation registers, beginning a tradition of squirrelly programming practices. The Intel/Microsoft empire is built on a heart of darkness - expedience, cynicism, and greed.