Inside Intel. Tim Jackson
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VP who had been brought in to replace Bob Graham, described the 4004 customer list as ‘not so much Who’s Who as Who’s That’.
In August 1972 Intel released a second microprocessor. Like the 4004, it had started out as a custom design project – this time for a company called Computer Terminals Corporation, which wanted to build a new display terminal. In accordance with the specification that CTC had given to Intel, the new processor handled data in chunks of 8 bits at a time rather than 4. It was known as the 1201 during its development. When the time came for launch, however, Ed Gelbach discovered that most Intel customers were utterly mystified by the company’s obscure system of numbering parts by function, capacity and start date. They thought the 4004 had earned its name because it was the company’s first four-bit microprocessor. It seemed only natural to call Intel’s first 8-bit machine the 8008.
The release of the 8008 helped to awaken glimmers of interest in the idea of using Intel microprocessors inside business computers as well as to add intelligence to industrial products. But the 8008 was little easier to program than the 4004. Until a set of compilers were developed, you had to write assembly-language instructions for the chip, telling it step by step to input this chunk of data, store it in that register, add it to the contents of the other register, output the result, and so on. Once you had your program ready in assembler, you then had to turn it into machine code – a set of two-digit hexadecimal numbers that could be fed to the processor one by one from the memory chip where the program was to be stored.
If it sounds complex and unfriendly, that’s because it was. Only two categories of people were likely to go to the trouble: engineers who could see a real commercial advantage from incorporating the chip into a product, and teenage hackers who thought the idea of messing about with their own computers was cool.
Two of the earliest hackers in this category were a pair of kids, aged seventeen and nineteen, from a private high school in northern Seattle. Bill Gates and Paul Allen clubbed together to raise the $360 they needed to buy an 8008 chip from a local electronics store. But not even the founders of what would later be Microsoft could make the 8008 support the BASIC programming language. Instead, they made an abortive attempt to use the chip to build a machine for a local traffic consulting company that would analyse tickertape counts of cars on suburban streets.
What made engineers in American industry take the microprocessor seriously was Intel’s first development system. Sold in a big blue box and known as the Intellec 4, the system was a tool that made it much easier and faster for outside engineers to develop and test programs for the new microprocessors.
Development systems proved a neat way of hooking customers into Intel’s product line. When a customer spent $5,000 on an Intellec 4, the chances were that it would spend another $50,000 on microprocessors over the next year or so. Then for every microprocessor, another half a dozen or more other peripheral chips including memory, ROM and input–output devices would be needed. This was the kind of business Ed Gelbach liked.
Even to those who didn’t believe the new device was the biggest thing that had ever happened to the electronics industry, the microprocessor began to look as though it had some promise. Perhaps it would never be a big money-spinner on its own account – but hell, if it helped to sell more memory, then that was just fine too.
FIFTEEN YEARS AFTER INTEL’S FOUNDATION Andy Grove published a book called High Output Management, in which he set out many of the lessons he had learned from his experiences with the company.
The book began with a chapter called ‘The Basics of Production: Delivering a Breakfast’. Grove set his readers a simple problem that he’d come across while working as a busboy shortly after his arrival in America. ‘Your task’, he wrote, ‘is to serve a breakfast consisting of a three-minute soft-boiled egg, buttered toast, and coffee. Your job is to prepare and deliver the three items simultaneously, each of them fresh and hot.’ Within a few pages Grove plunged into the complexities of production management, using the breakfast ‘factory’ as an example. Continuous egg-boiling machines, toast-making delays, problems with rotten ingredients and rude staff – these and many other issues were dealt with as the proprietor of ‘Andy’s Better Breakfasts’ learned how to deliver an acceptable hot meal at an attractive price.
‘Bear in mind’, the Intel veteran wrote, ‘that in this and in other such situations there is a right answer, the one that can give you the best delivery time and product quality at the lowest possible cost. To find that right answer, you must develop a clear understanding of the trade-offs between the various factors – manpower, capacity and inventory – and you must reduce the understanding to a quantifiable set of relationships.’
Not too many people in the restaurant trade could tell you with confidence the link between the number of waiters they employ, the number of pieces of bread their toasters can handle every minute, and the number of eggs in the cold store at the end of the day. But in the infinitely more complex business of chip manufacturing, where there are dozens of different steps to making a product, scores of people with different skill levels involved, and new production processes and machinery being introduced all the time, the job of ‘reducing the understanding to a quantifiable set of relationships’ is almost nightmarishly difficult.
It was Grove’s determination to succeed at this piece of analysis that made Intel’s first years of production so stressful. Theoretician that he was, Grove had no truck with the touchy-feely approaches to manufacturing that he believed were common elsewhere in the industry. Instead, he wanted to be able to express Intel’s production lines as a set of equations like those he’d published in his book Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices. To do this, he needed facts: statistics in huge quantities, regularly delivered.
But this was 1971, not 1991. There was no company Intranet, no spreadsheet software – not even any desktop computers. The statistics that Grove demanded had to be collected and tabulated largely by hand – by people who were having problems enough just getting through the day, producing any output at all from the rudimentary designs and processes in Intel’s fabs. Most Intel engineers were lucky if they got home before midnight in time to see their families. No wonder there were stresses.
The 1101, Intel’s first silicon-gate MOS product, had been hard enough. ‘We embarked on this new technology … because of its perceived superior characteristics, although nobody was using this type of technology at the time,’ said Les Vadasz afterwards. ‘And the damn thing didn’t work! Week after week, we just pushed wafers through the line with zero yield! We were seriously beginning to doubt the correctness of our technology direction. But perseverance did pay off …’
The problems Intel had with the 1103 were of a different order of magnitude. Grove, who admitted to suffering from weeks of sleepless nights while trying to get the part into mass production, looked back on it as ‘almost as much fun as your final exams at college’.
‘I can remember twice a day going out on the line and physically counting 1103s as the introduction date drew closer,’ recalled another engineer. ‘We almost knew each good unit by name.’
Others came almost to hate the endless measurements and endless tiny changes they had to make both to the design of the chip itself and to the process used to build it, in an attempt to find a ‘sweet spot’ that would deliver reasonable yields. So heartily did they come to hate the troublesome 1103 that they referred to the job of getting it into mass production as ‘turd polishing’.
The hourly paid people who worked on the production lines, mostly young women, could be offered the incentive of cash – delivered in crisp dollar bills at the end of every week, because Grove believed in the animal trainer’s principle of making the reward immediately and visibly linked to the good performance that had earned it. They could be told to watch Betty or Jane, who seemed to be producing a higher percentage of usable parts, and imitate exactly what she did. They could be forbidden to wear make-up