There are 2 interesting articles here. Not only does Ken treat us with a great text, but hidden in footnote 1 is a second gem. Thanks for the early christmas gift!
> we found that the engineers were automating things by writing their own scripts where in earlier days you might have to go to ask a CAD person to come and do something for you -- and that’s difficult to do. Much easier if the engineers can do it themselves and I think that all came about because we instituted Unix for the 386 design. Again if management knew what we were doing they wouldn’t have let us do it.
> He walked across the street from Santa Clara 4 to Amdahl and they had a Unix that ran on 370 computers. So he went over there and got a tape and brought it back, sent it over to Phoenix where the mainframes were and told 'em to load it. They did, not knowing what was on that tape because they never would have done it if they had known
It's wild to read that Intel's flagship product, the part that basically defined the next 40 years of computing, might have turned out very differently if management and/or IT knew what the engineers were doing.
Another interesting thing is that the Unix guru on the 386 project was Pat Gelsinger, who later became Intel's CEO. Gelsinger also converted at least one member of the 386 team to Christianity.
