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| | Life begins at 40, for Intel - In Memoriam 40 is the new 30, 50 is the new 40, the 286 is the 186 By Mike Magee @ Monday, July 14, 2008 3:03 PM
Section - PCs/Chips | | | | The chip giant formerly known as Chipzilla (tick: INTC) is 40 this Friday. This means it's probably getting a) long in the tooth, and b) getting grey hairs as well and ordering Cialis on the web.
As I am 58, this means I was 18 when Intel was zero, but I already had been inducted into the mysteries of semiconductors with the Mullard transistor, the Schmitt trigger and that very large scale integration (VLSI) stuff, quite some years before. Yeah. I'm older than Intel by quite a bit.
 There is very little that has happened in the last 40 years in the semiconductor industry to write home about. Inexorably, the process technology has got smaller, the profits have got smaller, and the software has got more bloated as the software geeks took advantage of the hardware and microarchitecture engineers who invented everything, really. Semiconductors are a kind of miracle which have turned into a curse, because far from making our life easier, they have made our life far more regulated. Luckily, software is buggy and will always remain so. Semiconductors, actually, are anti-Republican and therefore almost by definition anti-American.
Intel at 40. How does it look? It is in the prime of its life, because 40 is the new 30. It has forgotten all its tribulations but it has a big problem looming, and will probably fall into the same trap all 40+ entities have. And that is the mid-life crisis. Assuming that Intel lives for another 40 years, by then we shall be in 2048, and I will be one year off living for nearly 100 years.
If I make it to 100 years old, that begs a question. Will the current Elizabeth II, Monarch of the United Kingdom and all its territories, send me a telegram of congratulation if she is still alive?
Or will it just be an email from His Maj saying: 'Isn't it time you were orf? Every dog has its day. You are terminated.' And will an X86 chip cost anything at all while Windows 24 costs an absolute fortune? [Yes, Ed.] X
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