25 years of life after fire

[cute fuzzy bunny]

So that was real? I heard this as a rumor but I just dismissed it as gossip. She was one that you either love or hate.

I am sure you and my husband know each other but let's keep everything annonymous. He also worked closely with Pat and he was in the Folsom campus longer than I was. We were very surprised how Pat ran Intel to the ground when he finally got the CEO job. If you read what happened, he pissed off a few big customers big time, like you need us but we don't need you, and lost them. The current CEO is turning it around finally.

Yeah I'm sure we did. Pat was one of those people when I worked for him he was one of the ones that I wouldn't have been surprised to jump up on a conference room table and threatened somebody with a knife. But when he got put in a CEO it was pretty much a no-win situation. Most of the good people had already taken a retirement deal or left the company and most of the people that were still around were the ones that were just sitting on their hands I couldn't handle that high-end load of work. So far behind in the technology as well he tried to do too much too fast. All the people that used to work for me are gone now they're retired as well so we get to hang around and drink coffee and drink beer together from time to time.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

I much prefer it when folks discuss a specific company they worked for back then, rather than talking about a generic "Megacorp".

I mean cripes, it's not like you're posting your Social Security and CC numbers...

Yeah when I used to post here a lot there are a bunch of Intel people and I do a whole lot of them we did exchange names and whatnot. Cliff perkiser was one of the guys that was also a middle management guy at Intel I don't know if he still posts here I think he posted his Cliff p

 

[TheWizard]

Nah it is interesting.

Correct...

 

[Koolau]

I figure you folks are bored with our conversation by now.

Rapt attention, baby. Rapt attention!

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Rapt attention, baby. Rapt attention!

You're right it is interesting among those of us who actually did this early retirement thing and made it some of us just pick the strategy and stuck with it and if it was a good one they did well. Others became accidental millionaires like me I just happened to be working for the right company at the right time during that tulip mania tech stock boom. And although I don't recommend market timing being out of the market after 2000 for a while and getting back out of it just before the Great recession sure helped me a lot. Both times I cashed out bought my next home before I sold my prior home and was sitting with a lot of cash where I was able to buy a lot of deeply discounted stock and then not look at it again. I just made an offer on my dream home in a 55 plus golf community and I managed to get a successful bid in because I looked at the market for the first time saw my portfolio and that I made $23,000 that day and up to my offer I beat out the other ones. Sure luck but if anybody wants to call me a genius go ahead

 

[RetiredHappy]

Since it appears that we have an audience here...

Did you know that a bunch of IT and engineering/tech people got paid a bunch of money from a class action lawsuit? My husband and I both got 5 figures checks many years after we left the company. What happened was that 2 people initially sued Intel/Google/... (a couple of Silicon Valley tech companies) that they had an agreement not to hire tech staff from each other. It became a class action lawsuit and emails were uncovered to be true. The judge decided that all these tech companies' tech employees lost about 10% of pay increase because of that, and employees between certain years were entitled to compensation. My husband got his check first and we had no idea what it was about. I then read up about the class action lawsuit and contacted Intel. It turned out that they had my husband's address because he is officially a retiree and they kept his address updated, while they kept my old address. They sent me a check to my new address thereafter.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Since it appears that we have an audience here...

Did you know that a bunch of IT and engineering/tech people got paid a bunch of money from a class action lawsuit? My husband and I both got 5 figures checks many years after we left the company. What happened was that 2 people initially sued Intel/Google/... (a couple of Silicon Valley tech companies) that they had an agreement not to hire tech staff from each other. It became a class action lawsuit and emails were uncovered to be true. The judge decided that we lost about 10% of pay increase because of that, and employees between certain years were entitled to compensation. My husband got his check first and we had no idea what it was about. I then read up about the class action lawsuit and contacted Intel. It turned out that they had my husband's address because he is officially a retiree and they kept his address updated, while they kept my old address. They sent me a check to my new address thereafter.

I didn't know that. I was pretty well entertained when I got a letter from hewlett-packard's pension fund saying that my pension fund login information may have been hacked. I never worked for Hewlett Packard. But I did work for 5 years and a couple of days for digital equipment corporation the old second largest computer company in the world and still was and still is if it was still in existence. A chunk of them got bought by Compaq who got bought by Hewlett-Packard and voila I have a little pension fund through them with fidelity. It would either be 50 to $80 a month when I reach 65 for the rest of my life but they gave me $8,000 as a lump sum instead. Sold! My days of selling vaxes paid off! It was amusing back in the late '90s when I found out that a piece of the it infrastructure that I inherited still used vaxes on the manufacturing line. I also owned the mainframe infrastructure. Whenever we had a meeting and they said say what your name is and what's your responsible for when I was done with the long line of b******* that I asked to take over everybody always said the same thing. You sure don't know how to duck do you?

 

[Koolau]

You're right it is interesting among those of us who actually did this early retirement thing and made it some of us just pick the strategy and stuck with it and if it was a good one they did well. Others became accidental millionaires like me I just happened to be working for the right company at the right time during that tulip mania tech stock boom. And although I don't recommend market timing being out of the market after 2000 for a while and getting back out of it just before the Great recession sure helped me a lot. Both times I cashed out bought my next home before I sold my prior home and was sitting with a lot of cash where I was able to buy a lot of deeply discounted stock and then not look at it again. I just made an offer on my dream home in a 55 plus golf community and I managed to get a successful bid in because I looked at the market for the first time saw my portfolio and that I made $23,000 that day and up to my offer I beat out the other ones. Sure luck but if anybody wants to call me a genius go ahead

I almost used "I'd rather be lucky than good" as my tag line.

Genius is when you know how to exploit your luck!!

 

[TheWizard]

I didn't know that. I was pretty well entertained when I got a letter from hewlett-packard's pension fund saying that my pension fund login information may have been hacked. I never worked for Hewlett Packard. But I did work for 5 years and a couple of days for digital equipment corporation the old second largest computer company in the world and still was and still is if it was still in existence. A chunk of them got bought by Compaq who got bought by Hewlett-Packard and voila I have a little pension fund through them with fidelity. It would either be 50 to $80 a month when I reach 65 for the rest of my life but they gave me $8,000 as a lump sum instead. Sold! My days of selling vaxes paid off! It was amusing back in the late '90s when I found out that a piece of the it infrastructure that I inherited still used vaxes on the manufacturing line. I also owned the mainframe infrastructure. Whenever we had a meeting and they said say what your name is and what's your responsible for when I was done with the long line of b******* that I asked to take over everybody always said the same thing. You sure don't know how to duck do you?

It's difficult to buy a VAX-780 anymore for some reason...

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

It's difficult to buy a VAX-780 anymore for some reason...

I was 21 years old when the first ones came off the line I worked on vax VMS version 1.0 before it launched. However I did have a major role in building something called a kdj-11a and the kdj-11b. Basically a very fast PDP 1170 in fact I think they called it a PDP 1174. It was faster than the vax 11780 but we had so much stuff invested in that the company decided to schedule the cute little Katie j11b it was about the size of a cube refrigerator my dad carved a little wood top with a couple of cup holders in it which I thought was hilarious. I remember right about then me and my nerdy 20-something friends talking about a mainframe that would actually sit on top of your desk or even underneath it. Now I'm holding that in my hand.

 

[kfsinc]

Great seeing a couple of X DEC people here! I too receive that letter from HP about my very small pension and was happy to take the few thousand dollar check that came with it.

Lots of great memories from back in the 80s.

I find it very interesting that much of our Cutting edge technology back then has become a reality today. Web Browsers, (X windows) connected to a network (Ethernet) connected to a cluster of computers somewhere far far away; Sounds like a cloud to me ;-)

And if I remember correctly, those of us that sold VAXes used a configuration tool billed as ‘artificial intelligence’ to create the order form?

And didn’t DEC create the original relational database as a part of VMS sell it to Oracle for a dollar?

What a long strange ride it’s been