"End of an Era" as Intel Chairman Craig Barrett to Retire in May
"End of an Era" as Intel Chairman Craig Barrett to Retire in May
Posted 01/27/2009 at 7:21pm
| by Mark Edward Soper
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With the announcement of Craig Barrett's retirement in May, one of Intel's last links with the pre-PC era will vanish. Barrett's career at Intel started in 1974, when Intel was just seven years old and was introducing the first general-purpose microprocessor, the 8080. The 8080's descendents included the first 16-bit processor, the 8086, and the IBM PC's processor, the 8088. The IBM PC and its many descendants enabled Intel's rise to processor dominance.
Barrett became Intel's CEO in 1998, taking over for the legendary Andy Grove. Barrett's tenure as CEO saw the development of Intel's first Celeron economy CPU and high-end Pentium III processors, the introduction of the Pentium 4, diversification into communications chips, development of new Xeon and Itanium server processors, and the introduction of the Centrino portable chipset/processor technology.
During this period, Intel received formidable challenges from AMD's Athlon and Athlon XP, and frequently saw its processors beaten by AMD's processors in real-world performance tests. Barrett became chairman of Intel in 2005, and during his tenure as chairman, saw Intel retake the performance crown from AMD with the introduction of the Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, and Core i7 processor lines.
Barrett, 70, is retiring at a time in which Intel, like other technology companies, is facing tough times, and announced last week that it's closing two fab plants in the US as well as three assembly test facilities in Malaysia and the Philippines, affecting over 5,000 employees.
What was the first Intel product you used? Was it a processor, motherboard, chipset, network adapter, or something else? Looking back at Barrett's long career, what do you think were Intel's biggest hits - and misses? Hit Comment and tell us.
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winmaster
January 31, 2009 at 6:28pm
I remember back in the day. My Windows 95 machine. 8MB of RAM. 800MB hard drive. I don't know what the processor's model number was, but it was Intel. What's funny is that machine booted faster than any other computer I've seen since.
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The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
PeterJ
January 28, 2009 at 2:30pm
Being old enough to remember these things, the first general purpose microprocessor from Intel was the 4004. This was 4 bit processor with a fixed instruction cycle time. I used this for decoding radar information in a project. I had an assembler that was loaded in via papertape and ran on a 4004 SDK board (I believe this meant Single board Development Kit) which ran an Intel 4004 with a teletype connected (an ASR33, who remembers those...). I believe the 4004 was released in 1971 or 1972 and was originally designed for a calculator. Then the 4040, 8008 and then the 8080 followed. Interesting times. I wrote a cross compiler for the 4004 and 4040 to run on an HP machine which used PL 1!!
Marcus_Soperus
January 29, 2009 at 2:02pm
Thanks for correcting the historical record. I pulled the description of the 8080 from the Intel history website, but it doesn't surprise me that earlier chips have gotten short shrift. BTW, I remember those teletype and paper tape reader rigs - I tried programming in BASIC using a time-share connection. That was so frustrating that I'm surprised I still like computers!
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It's amazing how illogical a business built on binary logic can be.
Keith E. Whisman
January 28, 2009 at 11:07am
That was back when IBM PC's And Clones had a Turbo button that ran the CPU at it's rated mhz and with the turbo button off the cpu ran at a lower mhz and voltage I believe. It's been a very long time now.
zeringue
January 28, 2009 at 5:15am
My first machine was an original IBM XT with an 8088 processor, and of course the best IBM keyboard with the functions keys on the left side. I still use two IBM microswitched keyboards.
I remeber doing AutoCad PC board layout on two screens one green and the other color with a hercules graphics card. Was amazed by the better regeneration times the 8087 math co proeccesor provided with AutoCad.
The performance boost from when we brought home the 80286 was awesome what a difference. 12Mhtz. wow.
Long Live Intel.
Marcus_Soperus
January 28, 2009 at 7:18am
I'm still using an IBM AT-style keyboard because of its excellent touch. My next primary keyboard will probably be one of the Unicomp keyboards with Windows keys (Unicomp bought the Lexmark keyboard division [formerly IBM's keyboard division] in 1996). Unicomp keyboards still use the IBM buckling-spring design that lets you know you actually typed something.
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It's amazing how illogical a business built on binary logic can be.
ProtoJMB
January 27, 2009 at 9:10pm
Yeah I remember the "IBM Compatible" era. However we used pure IBM's for the first couple years.
Our first computer was an IBM PS/1. It had an Intel 486 processor. Cannot remember the speed at all, but that was our first Intel processor. Right after that was the original Pentium in our IBM Aptiva, that was 150MHz. Then for a a while we were off the mainstream processor track with a bunch of comptuers that used shoddy Celerons. So we pretty much skipped the "Slot era" of Pentium II and Pentium III. Got back on the mainstream station when I built my first computer, which had a 2.0GHz Pentium 4. Now I run with a 3.0 GHz Pentium D. I am planning on upgrading to the 2.4 Q6600 Core 2 Quad.
Keith E. Whisman
January 27, 2009 at 9:06pm
Me too! I had an 8086 and 8088. Back when computers not built by IBM were known as IBM Clones.
whitneymr
January 27, 2009 at 8:30pm
I go back to the original IBM PC with an 8086 and 64k of memory. Man I'm getting old.
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