HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ guerrilla

This is very funny. A lot of the people who were there are in the audience correcting him and arguing. The interesting thing here I think is how the business worked. The video answers why they second sourced and how second sourcing really work behind closed doors and it touches a bit on the creation of the market.

Recorded January 26, 2009 at the Computer History Museum.

From the Description:

"Under the leadership of Andy Grove and Gordon Moore, the personal computer market changed in October 1985 with the launch of the Intel 80386 microprocessor. Today, no one will dispute that Intel is a world-leading company, but few recall that Intel's path to becoming a technology giant was solidified by an unprecedented business strategy. In this lecture Harvard Business School Professor and CHM Board Member Richard S. Tedlow presents and reviews Intel's sole-source supplier business strategy.

Learn how Intel forever changed the landscape of the computing industry with its decision in the mid-1980s to act as the sole source for its revolutionary 80386 microprocessor. Prior to this risky and unorthodox move, companies would second-source products by licensing their technology to competitors the way it was always done. The 386 microprocessor marked the end of second-sourcing and the beginning of Intels leadership as a components-supplier in the personal computer market. But why was this significant and what did it mean to the future of the microprocessor and the future of personal computers?

Professor Tedlow presents the business case, as taught in his Harvard Business School classes, to describe how these important decisions were made and what valuable lessons we can learn from Intel's industry-changing business choices."

⬐ supernovae

What I find interesting, is no one ever remembers the Intel 386, and no one will ever forget the AMD 386/DX 40.

Partly because the prevalent intel's were often those over priced 386 sx/16s and really Intel didn't gain much wind until the 486 dx2 66 and more importantly, the pentium 1 and pentium 3 - but fabs really weren't make or break until p4 and beyond when they became a manufacturing competitive advantage in die size

⬐ phicoh

I agree that the 386 was realitively rare. I still have one. And I remember how long it was between Intel's original announcement and 386 class becoming mainstream in PCs.

However, at the time the 386 was announced I read an article about it. And that was long before I even had access to a 286. But it shaped me in thinking, let's skip the 286, and wait for the real thing right around the corner: 32 bits and an MMU.

⬐ supernovae

yup, it's so weird we used to champion the "DX" over "SX" but reality is - some cache would have probably meant more to consumers in the end.

BUT.. i loved it back then.. so many choices... and a few mhz did immensely matter. Breaking 100mhz - HUGE deal.. then 233... then 500 and once AMD hit 1ghz on their k5s they were top dog and stopped trying for the longest time and intel ate their lunch from then on up until Ryzen

fun times :)

⬐ klelatti

I’d strongly contest the idea that this was risky. If the 80386 had failed to get traction because of the single sourcing they could quickly change course and recruit some second sources.

⬐ sourcecodeplz

My first was a local brand that had BASIC. The next was a 286 and all my friends had 386. What a difference. ..

⬐ ubermonkey

Man, the 386 was such a huge leap.

I went to college with an 80286 in 1988. It was a splurge, but I had saved money and a full ride to school, so it was a future-proofing thing. I enjoyed a couple years of absolute hardware superiority in my dorm, which was fun, but by 1991 it was time to upgrade.

I bought a 33Mhz Gateway 2000 80386, and HOLY CRAP the speed boost was amazing.

People love to run this-or-that task on a new machine to bask in the speed, but the jump over the 286 here was so huge that just running "dir" on a directory with lots of files was entertaining. It was ridiculously fast; we giggled.

No word of it a lie, that jump was the single most shocking and amazing upgrade of my computing life; nothing later came close until the point about a decade ago when I swapped out the spinning drive in my Macbook Pro for an SSD.