September 29, 2005 – Setting Off a High Tech Explosion

September 29, 2005 – Setting Off a High Tech Explosion

When I first entered the world of public relations back in the autumn of 1977, I was admitted because I understood the technology that was beginning to emerge in the Santa Clara Valley of Northern California. I had some skill in journalism having served for nine months as the west coast editor for a now-defunct computer publication, but that was less of a consideration. I joined the Regis McKenna Advertising & Public Relations firm then on the northwest corner of Lytton Avenue and Waverley Street. My largest client was Intel Corp. I knew the company’s products from my time with Diablo Systems, a Xerox Corp. company, where I worked before joining the magazine. Diablo had designed and built a computer system for small business using the Intel 8080 microprocessor as its central processor unit. The system was housed in an enclosure that resembled a desk with the computer hardware where you would normally find the file drawers and a Diablo daisywheel printer, computer monitor, and keyboard on the desktop.

If you are under 40-years old, it’s hard to picture the 1970s industrial design of the system, but it’s most glaring feature was up to four black metal 8-in. floppy disk drives—the mass storage for the system, mounted such that the 8-in. floppy media was inserted vertically. The daisywheel printing element is a plastic wheel containing all the letters and numbers spinning at high speed and a hammer slamming the spoke tip with letter or number against a carbon ribbon that imprinted on the paper, an improvement over the golf ball printing element that was once pervasive in all IBM typewriters. I’ve belabored the description of this system for two reasons. The first is that the Regis McKenna Agency had purchased one of these systems. The second is that I wrote all the documentation for the system. I mention the latter because the system integration company that sold the agency the system, packaged with accounting software for an advertising agency, complained about the documentation, a criticism that I took personally.

At the time I joined the agency, one of my PR campaigns was to introduce the Intel 8086. The 8086 was the first 16-bit computer from Intel—the 8080 was an 8-bit CPU—and was the progenitor of the CPUs in all Intel-based computers of today. Every software routine running on an Intel-based PC today, is executing the instruction set, first introduced on the 8086. At the time 8086 debuted, the IBM PC didn’t exist. So called microcomputers—to distinguish them from minicomputers and mainframes—back then, were largely built on the Intel 8080 processor and executed the CP/M operating system from Digital Research—“the” operating system for personal computers of the day. Alternatives that ran proprietary operating systems, such as the Commodore PET and Apple II—called “home computers” incorporated the 6502, a microprocessor designed by Chuck Peddle and a team of engineers for a company called MOS Technology. Peddle and his followers had designed the 6800 for Motorola but left en masse afterwards.

Intel had two major competitors back then they cared about: Motorola with its 6800, and Zilog, the company that had built an 8080-compatible processor, the Z80, that was faster than the 8080. Intel was determined to grab the performance mantle away from both these competitors. The 6502 wasn’t on their radar screen. Intel feared Motorola because it was then a formidable competitor among customers the two companies coveted. In one of the agency meetings the Intel product marketing team rolled out its treadmill strategy: produce a product roadmap in which each successive generation of processor increased performance sufficiently that the competitors had to struggle to keep up. The 8086 was to be the first in the line. My job was to manage a product roll-out that would have the Intel product featured in as many publications as possible, all echoing the message of performance leadership.

One of the great problems of any public relations agency is overemphasis on “relations.” Face-to-face meetings and phone conversations with clients and media are billable hours. However, building awareness and making a case for the position Intel wanted to create requires reasoned argument and this had to be done in print and others had to read what you wrote and be infected by its message so that they repeat it with the same conviction that you wrote it. Getting a written document that encapsulated what the company wanted to say and provided worthwhile information to journalist was one of the toughest jobs to complete.

The agency had developed a reputation for being knowledgeable about high tech, which meant we would get most of our phone calls returned. Regis had also cultivated a relationship with editors at the New York Times, Business Week, and Fortune. On a major rollout such as the 8086, he would take a company executive to New York to meet with these contacts and brief them on what the company planned to announce. These meetings typically had to come close to the time of the actual announcements since there were no negotiating embargo dates on the information. Once the conversation took place, the publication could run with the story if they felt it was worth covering. In the wake of these meeting, besides the reporter’s note the only reminder that the meeting took place was the written materials left behind, the press release and any other background information prepared to support the announcement—major announcements at Regis typically had an accompanying backgrounder.

I arranged for coverage in the trade publications, the foremost of which was Electronics back then owned by McGraw Hill and considered the publication of record for the electronics industry. In the pecking order of other publications came Electronic Design, EDN, Computer Design, MiniMicro Systems, and the two tabloid papers of the day, Electronic News and Electronic Engineering Times. Of those I’ve mentioned the last two magazines and the first tabloid ceased publication. This was not an exhaustive list of publications but the ones that reached the audience Intel was most interested in influencing. These magazines were the forum for the engineering community the agency’s clients wanted to build a relationship with. Before the Internet, publications such as these provided the medium for conveying information about new products, technologies, and goings on in the industry.

Of these publications, Electronic News was the no-nonsense newspaper that didn’t believe in embargoed information. If they heard the story they would print it and they were constantly probing their sources for leaks on new product announcements as well as business dealings that would raise eyebrows if brought to light. This was the publication that published the hard news about the industry, the firings, criminal activity, scandals, as well as soft news: promotions, job changes, and new products launched. The tabloid hired journalism graduates and let them loose to practice their skills. The most feared reporter for Electronic News, however, was Don Hoefler a veteran newspaper journalist, who had left the tabloid before I joined the agency but had started his own newsletter.

I approached Electronics and gave them an exclusive on the announcement of the 8086 in exchange for a cover story. Once this deal was struck, I approached the other publications with article proposals as well as press materials on the new product given under agreement to observe the embargo date. The semiconductor editor for Electronics back then was LA. His immediate boss was SW, who happened to be of the old school of journalism where LA was from the more “enlightened” school, which suggested compromise if a good story would result. Regis had developed a close working relationship with everyone at Electronics, but LA was by far the easiest to work with.

LA, SW, and their west coast editor BA came to Intel to interview the major players in the rollout including the VP of marketing, the engineers who were writing the article for the publication—back then getting an article published in Electronics was looked on favorably within a company such as Intel—company founder Gordon Moore had published his now famous law in the publication nearly a decade earlier. LA was gathering information for a technical feature he would write to accompany the Intel author’s piece. The whole “dog and pony” show took the better part of a morning, after which we treated the editors to lunch with the Intel marketing manager.

In preparation for the actual product launch, GS the agency’s lone writer produced a backgrounder which explained the market for these next generation processor chips, what a microprocessor was and what it enabled to be built, and how the advent of these more powerful machines would likely impact the way we all lived our lives. GS was a great writer, an ex-Electronics editor that Regis has convinced to come to work for him. I’ve described in before in other entries, but it bears repeating that he reminded me of a medieval monk engrossed in his work putting words on paper with almost religious fervor. He had a mustache and wrote all his copy on a manual typewriter. He was a bit shorter than my five foot six inches in height, a receding hairline, the face of a press room journalist: intense concentration over a typewriter etching lines in his forehead and around his eyes—I regret not remembering the color of those eyes that often seemed to be looking inward at a story being written in his mind.

I have a Xerox copy of the double-spaced draft of the 20-something page document. When I reread it today in light of what has happened it reads like prophesy. Shortly after the announcement of the 8086, IBM decided to built its own personal computer and chose the 8088 as the engine for the system. Internally the 8088 and 8086 were identical. The one difference was the 8088 transferred data to and from its mass storage device 8 bits at a time whereas the 8086 transferred 16 bits at a time. Once IBM made their choice, the other processors available at the time began living on borrowed time. I keep looking back in time at moments that represented major forks in the road. The 8086 was one of those forks, which led to the IBM adoption, which led to where we are today.