They definitely did some amazing stuff and had world-class engineers. It's been fun to see where they've all gone since - you all are probably using some of their subsequent work in your day-to-day. ;)
A couple first- and second-hand anecdotes:
(Remember, this was back in the day of software being distributed on CD.)
I was flying back a conference in the Bay Area and we took a detour over to the office in Scotts Valley to pick up the "Gold Master" CD-R for the latest release of one of our products to hand-carry back to Santa Barbara, there a co-worker met me at the airport and drove the CD to the pressing facility in Los Angeles so we could get them duplicated and packaged in time for the release. (For a junior employee at the time, that was pretty fun.
Engineering was down to the wire on the next release of KPT and one of the algorithms folks came up with one more function and IM'd the code to the app team who dropped it in as another option in a list minutes before doing the final build.
Intel sent us pre-release Pentium III hardware so we could optimize our apps for their new instruction set.
They definitely did some amazing stuff and had world-class engineers. It's been fun to see where they've all gone since - you all are probably using some of their subsequent work in your day-to-day. ;)
A couple first- and second-hand anecdotes:
(Remember, this was back in the day of software being distributed on CD.)
I was flying back a conference in the Bay Area and we took a detour over to the office in Scotts Valley to pick up the "Gold Master" CD-R for the latest release of one of our products to hand-carry back to Santa Barbara, there a co-worker met me at the airport and drove the CD to the pressing facility in Los Angeles so we could get them duplicated and packaged in time for the release. (For a junior employee at the time, that was pretty fun.
Engineering was down to the wire on the next release of KPT and one of the algorithms folks came up with one more function and IM'd the code to the app team who dropped it in as another option in a list minutes before doing the final build.
Intel sent us pre-release Pentium III hardware so we could optimize our apps for their new instruction set.