Fun Friday – If a Sequoia Falls in an Angry Forest of Limiteds, Does it Care? Martian Craters and the Lives of Eels!

Firstly and most importantly, there is a fascinating article about the eels returning to the Sargasso Sea to reproduce in Smithsonian Magazine that I highly recommend reading. Eels have played a part in literature, myth and cuisine for eons, but little is yet known about their life cycle. I wonder how they feel, after living so many years in brackish shoreline and fresh waters, making the long journey back to the salty sea to spawn and die? Do they miss it? Do they want to leave? What do they dream?

From the deep seas to the starry skies, one can learn a bit about crater counting to determine (roughly) geologic events. This technique, first devised for lunar geology, can with caveats be applied to Mars. So what are you waiting for? Count those craters!

Finally, out in Silicon Valley venture land, the crypto fallout continues, with one of the most powerful and ruthless venture firms on Sand Hill Road diving into the foxhole. According to Bloomberg, “Sequoia Capital wrote down the full value of its $214 million investment in FTX only weeks after hailing the founder of the embattled cryptocurrency exchange as a “legend” with a “savior complex.”” Ouch!

This especially must bite all the other investors who in June 2021 let Sequoia lead them down the merry path of a $1B investment round. How times, and valuations, change.

Since then, while man-child Mr. Bankrupt, er, Bankman-Fried, who obstensibly ran FTX and is incidentally the spawn of law professors from Stanford — an investment fund that also runs a university — has been running around begging understanding of his plight, Sequoia decided to handle this disgrace by sacrificing one of their lesser lights to the Gods of Mammon — even though poor Divya Gupta wasn’t even at Sequoia when they led that fateful round in 2021. Heck, he hardly had the chance to get his feet moist, as it were, before things collapsed. Ah well, at least they don’t make them walk the plank anymore (I think). 

Partner Alfred Lin, Mr. FTX is Swell, had the pleasant duty of apologizing to their Limited for this debacle, whining that they really really really did their diligence (snort) and that they were misled (hahahaha). 

Sure, it’s absolutely commonplace for a little venture firm like Sequoia to not have the resources to conduct proper due diligence of an investment opportunity and its founder, ignore the paperwork, and glad-hand other venture firms using the “Trust me, we’re the smart money” mantra to get everyone else to dive in – NOT. 

But they are saying now that they have learned their lesson: “Moving forward, Sequoia partners said they would be more cautious about making substantial investments in companies whose founders they did not have a longstanding relationship with for investments made out of its global growth and expansion funds.”

I guess Stanford is no longer welcome at the Christmas party.

Happy Holidays!

Fun Friday: Twitter and the Age of Anti-Innovation


“One lesson that has to be remembered in my line of business is that when an operation is over it is OVER.The temptation to stay just one more day or to cash just one more cheque can be almost overwhelming, ah, how well I know. I also know that it is also the best way to get better acquainted with the police. Turn your back and walk away – And live to graft another day.” The Stainless Steel Rat, Harry Harrison

Well, I wasn’t going to talk about Musk, but I’m a bit jealous. First he subpoenaed Stanford University about twitter’s 1995 origins  — a university he claims he spent all of two days at in the materials science engineering PhD program at that time. Then he up and forgot he was going for an interesting Silicon Valley history lesson and decided to buy the company anyway. Sigh.

Perhaps he gave up because he skipped out on paying Stanford their exorbitant tuition and fees by not enrolling, and he’s worried they still have the bill. Actually, this is very possible — my own father attended Stanford and left with a $100 owed them. A generation later, when his son got admitted, Stanford still remembered. Academic debt is eternal. But the boring story is Musk got a better deal and frankly, I don’t remember twitter as an “item” at all. Go figure.

This was a heady five years for me and William: after writing the two year 386BSD series “Porting Unix to the 386″ in Dr. Dobbs Journal and the source code of 386BSD 0.0, 0.1, and 1.0/2.0 , and the DDJ 386BSD Release 1.0 CDROM with all the writings and annotations in 1994, by 1995 we were putting the finishing touches on the first volume of Source Code Secrets while inventing role-based security, polymorphic protocols and new approaches in high speed networking (these articles actually led to a rethink in high speed networking that birthed InterProphet in 1997), and tinkering with CDROM filesystems on a lark. So forgive me for missing the import of this crucial event.

Musk has an axe to grind. Actually, he has several axes to grind. Anyone who knows the history of SpaceX has seen his axe. I assume he was going to bury it right in Stanford’s backside by grabbing any info they have about Twitter and its hapless former CEO Parag Agrawal, but I suppose he’s now quite happy being Chief Twit (not my first choice for a moniker — I think Big Tweeter would be better) and chopping up anything that moves. My guess is he’s now looking for some confirmation of those darn bots popping up everywhere, like heffalumps and woozles. Are they real? Or just a fever dream? Who knows?

But 1995 does stand out in retrospect. It can be considered officially the year anti-innovation became the watchword in investment even as amazing technologies like open source came to the fore. The opportunities for grift on the Internet (don’t forget that “no one knows you’re a whatever” meme) was so compelling and sexy that *any* attempt to disrupt this was taken as a threat. 

Limit the words. Limit the thought. The nastier, the better. No discourse. No remorse. Virality uber alles. (Haven’t we learned by now that virality leads to pandemics?) 

Like crack, the unfiltered quips of just about anybody and their bot was addictive — especially to journalists. Gotta admit, it’s a lot harder to track down and interview people in depth, or attend press conferences, or sort through press releases, or travel to obscure places, or actually cross-check your sources first — especially if you’re not getting paid well for it. Twitter made all that stuff superfluous. What mattered was being the first. “Covfefe”, yeah baby! Deep stuff. Quit twitter? Forget it. They’re permanently addicted, and Musk knows it.

While twitter has an outsized influence on journalists who write about twitter, who else uses twitter, really? Politicians? Extremists? The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City? The most lucrative demographic from a marketing ad sales standpoint is young people, not these people. But most of the kids have migrated to other more trendy sites, like tiktok or instagram. Twitter usage declined 10% among teens over the last seven years according to Pew Research. Heck, even Facebook is doing better than them, and from my perspective it’s been getting grayer along with my cohort.

The problem with a cynical viral play is that things like “making money” or “building a product” are unimportant. We’ve seen that time and again, but twitter was the worst of the worst for lacking even a modicum of humor and humility. Even when they had a chance to build something sustainable for a younger target audience, their tendency to kill anything that smacked of building a real business was stomped on. Virality and viciousness don’t require innovative talent and product. 

One example of their anti-innovation attitude was their acquisition of Vine, a trivial and frankly unthreatening six second video loop site. It was clear by the early 2000s that video was an interesting opportunity. Heck, I was pitching ExecProducer’s Massive Video Production strategy and online automated video production mid-2000s on Sand Hill Road. ExecProducer and CoolClip had much more sophisticated video server production than Vine, with a very different focus. So Vine should have been a no brainer to move twitter into a younger demographic, right? Uh, nope. After four miserable years, it was shut down. In the end, twitter acquired a potential rival — and killed it.

I wish the anti-innovation euphoria popular in the Silicon Valley investment scene would become tiresome. But it’s just too easy to make and lose money. Currently, venture capital investment is sitting on $500B of dry powder according to Pitchbook. Think of those numbers, folks. $500 BILLION DOLLARS, just sitting in accounts, waiting for the next six months flip unicorn. It boggles the mind.

Real innovation is risky. It takes time. We can’t flip a startup in six months doing real code, real hardware, real systems. It takes time to convince customers to try our stuff. It takes time to shake out the bugs. But it’s also a heck of a lot of fun and necessary.

Because sometimes the grift really does end. And you don’t want to be there when it does.

Fun Friday: Telescopes and Memories

I’ve been planning to write something for a while, but frankly, there hasn’t been anything really fun to write about.

Everyone is complaining about gas prices and inflation. Global trade is still bottlenecked and tangled in knots. There’s still a pandemic, folks, although you wouldn’t know it from the way people are dancing like it’s the last night before the End of the World.

On the business front, venture is busily grabbing any money they can to hoard while telling their portfolio companies to “tighten the belt”, mainly around the necks of their employees. Companies are eagerly complying by rescinding job offers and instituting layoffs. Folks are nervous as they crowd airports, hoping their flight isn’t one of the hundreds cancelled that day due to lack of flight staff. And the war in Ukraine waged by Russia in a fit of insanity continues to kill innocents and destabilize the entire EU.

Speaking of dead innocents, the US Supreme Court, destined to go down in history as depraved pandering sacks of shit, decided that guns everywhere makes for a stronger America. Their overturning of Roe v Wade, expected after the leaked draft admiring the people who burned innocent people as witches crawled out of the sewers, has been released and to no one’s surprise reduced women to that of beasts. Yes, it is not a Fun Friday for many people. Maybe it’s a Gun Friday. I’m sorry.

Roe v Wade was decided in 1973. I was twelve. It impacted my life and health for the better. Today it is officially overturned in a ruthless precedent-be-damned legal coup. I am sixty, past childbearing age. It cannot impact me directly. Yet I have daughters and young people I care about. I don’t want to see them hurt. Their happiness and livelihood and health matters to me. They should have the same rights to choice and freedom that I had. They may not know how much it matters yet. But they will. I am sure of that.

I spent the morning cleaning one of William’s prototype telescope designs for display in the office. It’s an unusually compact and minimalist design. As I cleaned the mirror and cover plate, I found a cricket living in the focuser. I watched it hop off the picnic table and out of sight, grabbed the telescope, and took it to the office.

It now sits amongst the many creative works William and I did together. Our reliquary. 375 computers. InterProphet low-latency networking boards. 386BSD articles and books and CDROM. An unpopulated six layer 375 motherboard.

In other parts of the office, an EtherSAN prototype unit box, a 386BSD CDROM with the heftiest liner notes ever made, 386 computers of various vintages used for 386BSD, and bins 386BSD and 375 disk drives, boards, and cables. Some complete and some mid-project, designs waiting for a hand to finish the work.

It is a reminder that things are never finished — they are only left in a state of usability for a time. Once that time passes, one either has to toss it away or begin again. I choose both. To toss some things away and to begin again on other things.

Young people also have a choice. They can fight for their freedoms — and they can toss them away. I hope they choose wisely.

Fun Friday: Low-Tech Delays for Cars, An Icon Retires, and Mars Sings

Silicon Valley continues to belt-tighten amidst the turmoil of inflation, the continuing and never-ending pandemic impacting global trade, and the “Hundred Days War” in Ukraine brought to the rest of the world by Russia’s kakistocracy. Venture firms continue to prioritize late stage companies with their largess, hoping to get ahead of the perceived end of civilization (just look for companies closing their Series E and F rounds). And the summer travel scene, much hoped to bring back the hospitality industry after two years of lockdowns and mandates, suffers from cancelled flights and worker shortages.

But all is not lost. On the bright side, IC cars may die out, not due to direct competition with EVs, but instead from a lack of a low-tech component — wire harnesses. According to Reuters, IC wire harnesses are not usually machine made, unlike component harnesses made in the computer industry (and also used in Li-ion battery harnesses like that in EVs like tesla). Instead, countries like Ukraine hand-crafted these necessary components for a plethera of IC cars from a variety of small sources, a low-cost approach that major auto companies saw no reason to change — until now. The EV platform is looking more and more cost-effective and sensible to auto manufacturers, all thanks to the little wire harness.

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Meta/FaceBook, and women-in-business Lean-In icon, has chosen to “lean out” of her role in favor of wedding planning and philanthropy. Privately, according to the Wall Street Journal (which I will not link to as it is subscriber-only folks), Sandberg was upset with company investigations into her private meddling with tabloid The Daily Mail over its reporting of her then-boyfriend, perennial jerk and still amazingly CEO of Activision / Blizzard Bobby Kotick, as well as improper corporate expenditures for her upcoming wedding to another billionaire after she dumped Bobby.

It’s gratifying, actually, to see this woman presented as a flawless advocate of corporate womanhood 1) demonstrate such poor taste in men, especially to a tabloid notorious for its duplicity and ruthlessness — here’s hoping number 2 works out better — and 2) not even bother to use her own private staff to put together her wedding and pull out her own personal platinum card when as COO she would have scrutinized everyone else’s expenses and use of facilities / resources.

Lest anyone worry about poor burned-out Sheryl, do not concern yourself. She has made plenty of money from her sojourn at FaceBook and will not have to return her dress to David’s Bridal for a more economical one.

Finally, listen to the Song of Mars — a haunting low moan which enriches the mind and the soul, complements of Maurice, Chide, et al published in Nature. As you read the paper, listen to the dreamlike song of another world. You will be enlightened.

Happy Friday.

Fun Friday: Funding in Transition and Mammalian Distributed Memory Storage

As inflation continues to take its toll on everyone’s investments as well as steak dinner (psst – get the rotisserie chicken at Costco instead), Silicon Valley is clearly in a state of transition. Startups have been told to tighten their belts financially. Layoffs in big tech companies have begun. “Growth” ventures are failing to get follow-on funding, primarily in the consumer space and media (in Substack’s case, they’re also proving the old adage that no one pays attention to writers).

But for every easy money gambit that’s falling out of the sky, there is hope for the dreamer and rogue. Venture firms are still collecting money hand-over-fist from desperate Limiteds eager to get some return with the stock market slowing. Folks with money want to make more money. There are lots of them.

Of course, this doesn’t directly help the small entrepreneur. Big Venture (TM) doesn’t fund the small fry inventing neat technologies anymore — they have too many Series D unicorn mouths to feed. Big tech companies are no longer a safe bet — they may fire you and escort you unceremoniously out the door without any warning. In hard times, loyalty is not its own reward.

But there are a lot of individual investors out there who can drop $1M on a neat tech idea. All the startups William and I founded started with a dream, some code, and a handshake during lousy economic times. They were funded precisely because making easy money on scams and gambits have evaporated.

So if you’ve got a good hard tech project, now may be the best time to go for it. The cash is still plentiful. Just play it cool. It worked for us. It can work for you.

Researchers tracked neural activity across a whole mouse brain to determine what areas were involved in storing a specific memory. Many brain regions found likely to be involved in encoding a memory (top) were also found to be involved in recall upon reactivation (bottom). Credits: Image courtesy of the Tonegawa Lab/Picower Institute.
Neural activity across a whole mouse brain to determine what areas were involved in storing a specific memory. Many brain regions found likely to be involved in encoding a memory (top) were also found to be involved in recall upon reactivation (bottom). 
Credits:Image courtesy of the Tonegawa Lab/Picower Institute. Read the article!

And speaking of distributed memory, a new study from MIT describes the mammalian brain as storing memory, not densely in a few regions, but instead loosely across many regions of the brain. This makes sense in a way. It’s a lot easier to completely lose a memory if it’s in one or a few locations than spread throughout the brain. Also, storing memories in larger “chunks” would result in a lot of wasted storage space since a memory is of varying size. Indirect references to each memory element, even if a few are lost, are more efficient than directly physically mapping a memory.

It does explain the dreamlike aspect of memories, doesn’t it? And also perhaps memories which are completely wrong but feel entirely real and true. Likely we lose a lot of these references that fill in some of the blanks over time. Associated elements, like smell, can track back along a pathway to a memory to give the gist of it, but it may be only a shadow of what was actually recorded.

But is the brain’s memory sparsely allocated as well? It may well be given this highly distributed storage across many parts of the brain. Sparse allocation is common in operating systems because it is usually faster and overall more efficient. But it can use more total memory than that of a densely allocated memory mechanism if most of the elements contain non-repeatable data. Are most of our memories just collages of a few meaningful pieces and a lot of filler? Perhaps dreams look odd precisely because they are just stray strands of sparse referents to redundant memories garbage collected by the brain and reallocated for use.

To dream. Perchance to sleep. Now that is the question.

Not-So-Fun Friday: William Jolitz in Memoriam

I’ve avoided writing about many things over the last few years of William’s long illness. Writing his obituary was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. He lived an amazing life full of discovery, wonder and terror. Selecting just a few vignettes to illustrate his character and strength of will was difficult. I miss him terribly.

For the last six months of his life and the first three months of his death, I avoided the Los Gatos office we shared over the years. There are so many projects we planned that are now left undone. Some I can finish. Others I must deconstruct. Some are lost forever, except in my memory.

But now here I am in the little office I shared with William, surrounded by the relics of technologies and products and startups past. The passion is never extinguished, but only delayed a little.

Much in the world has changed but still stays exactly the same. Things William and I and others no one else remembers get rediscovered again and again. Things that shouldn’t be get dug up and instantiated with a “This time for sure” enthusiasm that belies sense. All for fame, or fortune, or just because it’s fun. It’s the Silicon Valley way.

And because memory is in the end all we have.

Fun Friday: AMD-Intel Battle Commences, Big Honking Space Guns, and our Good Friend, the Comb Jelly

The Changing Face of Intel (Economist, 2021)

Another slow Friday. Texas has frozen over. California is becoming ever-drier. The Polar Vortex has crept downwards over the decade to now reach Mexico. Summer will be burning. And the pandemic continues.

Everywhere climate change has come for us all. We are not ready for it. Not. At. All.

Pat Gelsinger has taken the reins at Intel, as the Economist notes (paid subscription). I do enjoy a piece that remembers Andy Grove, the iconoclastic Intel CEO who passed away in 2016 and made Intel a leader in microprocessors. 

I remember hearing rollicking stories of the semiconductor industry from Dick Williams, then retired Director of Research from Ford Aerospace / Loral, when we shared an office in the late 1990’s at InterProphet (he was on the Advisory Board).

Back in those days, he would recount, creating semiconductor processes was so difficult that people would talk about it from different firms over drinks after work, so everyone knew everyone. He also hired Bob Noyce into his first job.

Andy Grove and Bob Noyce were among the Traitorous Eight who founded Fairchild Semiconductor. When that got stuffy, Noyce left with Gordon Moore (of the famed “Moore’s Law”) to found Intel, and of course immediately pulled in Grove and dived into DRAM — and did well, until the DRAM Wars drove them out. That’s when the X86 series was born. 

By the time the 80386 was established in the late 1980’s, we were outlining a new open source Unix future with 386BSD and A Modest Proposal in 1989. When we were updating 386BSD in 1990, we were given access to their prototype 80486 processor at their headquarters here in Silicon Valley — just so 386BSD would run correctly.

I actually have a fondness for the early Intel. They were supportive of 386BSD and courteous, unlike AMD’s bland officiousness. Later on, when Intel abandoned 386BSD and went exclusively to Linux for what they thought were legal concerns, I was disappointed but not surprised. There was a lot of “fake news” back then about 386BSD and us, and there was no Snopes to counter it. 

Only years later was I told by one of my retired Intel executive contacts that they made a mistake in that decision, as none of the catastrophic claims ever came to pass. But it was water under the bridge at that point, and I had gone on to found InterProphet, a TCP low-latency fabless semiconductor company with William. It was just another of the many opportunities in Silicon Valley killed by malign neglect.

Now Pat Gelsinger, architect and technologist, is back at Intel, and he has quite a mess to clean up. Bad business decisions, delays in chip production, and an unimaginative product roadmap might still have not hampered Intel’s profitability. But unlike the Sanders era of AMD, the current CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, is a brilliant technologist and business leader who has led AMD to leadership in the industry.

So now a battle of equals commences. AMD and Intel. It should be interesting, to say the least.

But while we’re waiting, there’s always Big Honking Space Guns from Russia and the ever-amazing comb jelly to bemuse and bewitch you, as they have me. 

Have a Fun Friday, everyone!

Fun Friday: AI Technology Investments, Failed Startups, 386BSD and the Open Source Lifestyle and Other Oddities of 2020

First, William Jolitz and I did a comprehensive article entitled Moving Forward in 2020: Technology Investment in ML, AI, and Big Data for Cutter Business Journal (April 2020 – paid subscription). Given the pandemic and upheaval in global economies, this advice is even more pertinent today. 

Instead of moving from technology to key customers with an abstracted total addressable market (TAM), we must instead quantify artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) benefits where they specifically fit within business strategies across segment industries. By using axiomatic impacts, the fuzziness of how to incorporate AI, ML, and big data into an industry can be used as a check on traditional investment assumptions.

For additional information on this article, please see AI, ML, and Big Data: Functional Groups That Catch the Investor’s Eye (6 May 2020, Cutter Business Technology Advisor).

Techcrunch presented their loser brigade list of 2020 failed startups in December of 2020 – although a few more might have missed the list by days. Some of these investments were victims of “the right startup in the wrong time”. Others were “the wrong startup in the right time”. And some startups were just plain “the wrong startup – period”. 

We mourn the $2.45 billion dollars which vanished into the eager pockets of dreamers and fools (we’re looking at you, Quibi – the pig that swallowed $1.75B of investment and couldn’t get any customers) and feel deeply for the Limiteds who lost money in one of the biggest uptick years in the stock market.

Thirty years have passed since we launched open source operating systems with 386BSD. Open source as a concept has been around for over 40 years, as demonstrated by the amazing GNU GCC compiler done by RMS. But until the mid-1990’s, most software was still held under proprietary license – especially the operating system itself. The release of 386BSD spurred the creation of other progeny open source OS systems and a plethora of open source tools, applications and languages that are standard today. However, the “business” of open source is still much misunderstood, as Wired notes in “The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders”. Some of the more precious gems excerpted:

But open source success, Thornton quickly found, has a dark side. He felt inundated. Countless people wrote him and Otto every week with bug reports, demands for new features, questions, praise. Thornton would finish his day job and then spend four or five hours every night frantically working on Bootstrap—managing queries, writing new code. “I couldn’t grab dinner with someone after work,” he says, because he felt like he’d be letting users down: I shouldn’t be out enjoying myself. I should be working on Bootstrap!

“The feeling that I had was guilt,” he says. He kept at it, and nine years later he and Otto are still heading up Bootstrap, along with a small group of core contributors. But the stress has been bad enough that he often thought of bailing.”…

…Why didn’t the barn-raising model pan out? As Eghbal notes, it’s partly that the random folks who pitch in make only very small contributions, like fixing a bug. Making and remaking code requires a lot of high-level synthesis—which, as it turns out, is hard to break into little pieces. It lives best in the heads of a small number of people.

Yet those poor top-level coders still need to respond to the smaller contributions (to say nothing of requests for help or reams of abuse). Their burdens, Eghbal realized, felt like those of YouTubers or Instagram influencers who feel overwhelmed by their ardent fan bases—but without the huge, ad-based remuneration.

Been there. Done that.

Not many Linux-come-latelies know this, but Linux was actually the second open-source Unix-based operating system for personal computers to be distributed over the Internet. The first was 386BSD, which was put together by an extraordinary couple named Bill and Lynne Jolitz. In a 1993 interview with Meta magazine, Linus Torvalds himself name-checked their O.S. “If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux,” he said, “Linux would probably never have happened.”

Linus was able to benefit from our two year article series in Dr. Dobbs Journal (the premiere coding magazine of the day, now defunct in an age of github), which along with the how-to details of “Porting Unix to the 386” we also included source code in each article. That, coupled with Lions Commentary on Unix (NB – the old encumbered Edition 6 version, and not Berkeley Unix) allowed Linus to cudgel together Linux. We had no such issues, as we had access to both Berkeley Unix and a source code license from AT&T for our prior company, Symmetric Computer Systems, and hence knew what was encumbered and what was not (Lions was entirely proprietary). Putting together an OS is a group effort to the max. Making an open source OS requires fortitude and knowledge above and beyond that.

Jalopnik, one of my favorite sites, found the ultimate absurd Figure 1 patents with this little gem of an article: Toyota’s Robocars Will Wash Themselves Because We Can’t Be Trusted. Wow, they really knocked themselves out doing their Figure 1, didn’t they? Womp Womp.

And finally, for a serious and detailed discussion of how the pandemic impacted the medical diagnostic side, I recommend this from UCSF: We Thought it was just a Respiratory Virus. We were Wrong (Summer 2020). Looking back, it was just the beginning of wisdom.

Stay safe, everyone!

Intel Ouroboros: Pat Gelsinger Returns to Build the Future

Classical Ouroboros. Wikipedia.

Pat Gelsinger is a technologist’ technologist. He worked on the X386 and X486 processors. We referenced the book he and Crawford wrote Programming the 80386 for our “Porting Unix to the 386” series in Dr. Dobbs Journal in the early 1990’s and the development of 386BSD. It was a seminal processor and work that helped launched the open source operating system movement.

Yet Pat didn’t stay to retire with laurels at Intel. After many years battling for Intel’s future, he left to head EMC and, later, VMWare. Now he’s been brought back to Intel as CEO effective 15 February 2021. Why?

In a nutshell, while Gelsinger was off dabbling in storage technologies and cloud services, Intel was burning through every single technology advantage people like Gelsinger had built. Now, Intel is facing a reckoning, and needs to build a future again.

And that future depends on people with technical and domain skill, like Pat Gelsinger. 

This was a bitter pill for Intel’s Board of Directors and executive team to swallow. But, as Baron Mordo said, “The bill comes due”. 

The roots of this squandering of the future was based not in technology, but in contempt of technologists. Risk-takers in both strategic and startup investment in the 1990’s and 2000’s saw the proliferation of new approaches as “chaotic”. 

InterProphet SiliconTCP board. 1998.

I sat in an office of a top tier VC firm on Sand Hill Road in the late 1990’s and listened to the “smart money” partner complain about how their investments in ATM were being disrupted by InterProphet’s SiliconTCP low latency chip — as if I owned the burgeoning TCP/IP technology and was personally damaging their investments with a few prototype boards, a handful of working FPGAs and some Verilog.

TCP/IP was present in the mid-1980’s in Berkeley Unix, and used in datacenters throughout academia and government. As Vint Cerf himself noted, it was a good enough solution to get packets from one point to another.

TCP/IP as an “ad hoc” technology was good enough to take out OSI, ISDN and ATM. I thought it was wiser to surf the tsunami instead of railing against it. That just bred resentment.

I sat in corporate offices in the 1990’s and 2000’s and heard complaints about how open source was overtaking proprietary software stacks, and it was ruining their projections and their business.

Berkeley Unix was a feeder of innovation from the early 1980’s. True, it was not a viable competitor to proprietary OS stacks until we launched 386BSD in the early to mid-1990s. From that open source stack, backed by Dr. Dobbs Journal, sprang a whole host of proprietary software industry competitors, including Linux.

Open source kernels like 386BSD and its many progeny would not have made inroads if there had not been a wealth of innovation already present to mine out by these groups — innovation that was neglected, minimized or attacked by established proprietary players. 

But up to the point we released 386BSD publicly, everyone underestimated us. It couldn’t be done. It wouldn’t be done. But it was done. I knew it could be done.

I sat in a room in the early 2000’s as a VP at Microsoft complained about how open source was a threat and how, looking right at me, they had gathered information on everyone involved and their families. As if developing the open source OS created some kind of ominous fifth column of open source software subverting their eternal rights to OS glory. It was…unpleasant. It was also incredibly horribly damaging personally.

I listened in the mid-2000’s as a VC “sympathetically” told us that we’d never get funding again after InterProphet. Not because we’d done anything wrong. We met our commitments. We built things. But because they didn’t want innovation and the risks that came with it. And their way to kill the message was to kill the messenger.

“The bill comes due”.

The resentment in the 1990s and 2000s towards new ideas and the creation of new products was intense. All they could see was damage to their five year technology plans and prior investments. The idea of hedging your bets was anathema, because that implied they couldn’t control the industry.

And mind you, it was about control. Control of technology. Control of innovation. Control of monetization. Control of creativity. Control of thought.

So here we are, in 2021. Intel squandered their future, slicing and dicing their monetization game. Intel’s “safe and sane” business relationship with Apple is now in pieces. In 2018 Apple maneuvered Intel into taking out Qualcomm as a competitor. In 2019 Apple acquired Intel’s smartphone modem tech and developed their own. In 2020 Apple introduced the M1 as a competitor to the high end X86 line. And that’s just one customer. The vultures are circling. Intel lost control.

Now Pat Gelsinger has agreed to come back. How will he pick up the pieces of a damaged company? I assume he’d only return if he had broad latitude in restructuring, hiring and firing. He’ll investigate interesting acquisition targets that offer a path forward for Intel. And he’ll look closely at how rivals like AMD under Dr. Lisa Su have done so well while Intel foundered.

Intel ouroboros. Pat is back at the beginning. It remains to be seen how he creates a future for Intel once again.

Sedate Sunday: Battle of the Batteries

Tesla has been in the forefront of fully electric vehicles (EV) at a time when most of the major car manufacturers only fitfully dabbled with short-range plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) and battery electric vehicles (BEV). Now that Li-ion batteries Tesla builds into battery packs at their Gigafactory have become standard, the automotive industry has essentially abandoned the older BEV battery approaches and embraced Li-ion.

The pursuit of energy dense batteries to increase range may take a left turn, however, due to cost. You see, the batteries used by all the EV car manufacturers today use cobalt in the batteries (Tesla uses Li-NCA — most others use Li-NMC), and cobalt is costly. So Tesla is now considering a less energy dense LFP (lithium iron phosphate) battery manufactured by Contemporary Amperex Technology Company (CATC, Fujian Province, China) for their Chinese Tesla EVs that does not require cobalt. In addition, instead of the current module packaging strategy, the cells would be bundled tightly directly, which CATC claims will result in an energy-dense battery pack comparable to current module-based battery packs using cobalt. This will take the battle of the batteries to a whole new level.