modern stuff

One of my postgraduate school CS professors worked on the iAPX 432 and his tidbit about the history of its development was that, whenever the EEs were confronted with a hardware-level problem by the CSs, the EEs would universally respond with, "Oh, well, that can be fixed by you software guys with a SMOP (small matter of programming).", in the microcode, and Intel's reference assembler, linker, and compilers. Obviously, he returned to academia before the project collapsed in a heap, and he might have had to scramble and compete with other departing CS PhDs (who would also have hung around too long). Many would probably be looking at another job where microprocessor microcode, assembler, linker, compiler, and system-level library development experience would have been highly desirable, and perhaps where the EEs were more reasonable. Plus, he didn't have to put "Served on what became the sunken shipwreck iAPX 432" on his resume/CV. That's because it wasn't yet at the Sixth Phase in the Six Phases of a Project, "Punishment of the Innocent, and Rewards for the Non-Participants". On Wed, Oct 24, 2018 at 6:35 PM Eric Smith via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: