Reflecting on my time at a tech company (aka 'Retiring from Intel')

I've queued up some blog drafts over the last couple of months but I haven't been able to generate the energy to finish them. They just didn't seem to have enough bulk to them.

So why posting now and with this 'new' content?  

Well, I want to share that I have elected to retire from Intel after 27.5 years. My last day will be September 30. While I'm moving on to the next chapter of life, I'll always cherish the time I spent at Intel. 

And in fact it is with no small amount of temerity I write this message, especially after receiving so many soulful and impactful farewell messages recently from Intel colleagues also opting into this retirement package.  I'm somewhat 'late' in penning my message, I'm afraid (at this point in time I haven't sent out the broad bcc'd "I'm leaving" email).  And then there's my all-time favorite parting message I captured from Sham at the end of the https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2023/05/open-platforms-snapshot-may-2023.html posting that I could never hope to emulate. 

But emulate I won't. In fact, I'll write this as I do most of my postings, sort of a rambling message to myself; on this sentiment I'm apparently not alone given quote of another 1.5 decade blogger "I keep this blog for me to write, not necessarily for others to read." https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2024/09/25/why_i_still_blog_after_15_years/. For this particular post I couldn't figure out where to insert a 'TL;DR' since I sometimes think that could be the title or theme of this whole blog series :) I only regret that I won't have a reason to author a successor to https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2024/02/27-or-anniversarynext12-ai-runtime.html. 

So for more of the TL 'too long," rewind the clock 32.5 years to my first five years post-undergrad in industry prior to Intel.  In those early days of 1992 back in Houston I was introduced to BIOS and embedded firmware development using Intel technology, from the i8051 through i80186 … and culminating with the P6. Beyond the data sheets, I also immersed myself deeply in Intel driven specifications like PCI and I2O (although forgotten by PCI SIG and intel.com, many still live on at https://bitsavers.org/pdf/intel/). These experiences ranged from poring over the black cover data public tomes of data books to the yellow-cover NDA documents, while continually being intrigued by what was happening at Intel via reading reports on the company in print periodicals like EE Times; this was the early 90’s prior to the internet going big.

Who knows? Maybe some of the work I contributed to at Intel, whether papers or books or specifications such as mentioned in https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2021/01/books-and-computers.html, might end up at bitsavers some day, say Beyond BIOS https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Bios-Implementing-Extensible-Interface/dp/0974364908 will have a URL like the RMX book http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/intel/iRMX/iRMX_III/Real-Time_and_Systems_Programming_for_PCs_1993.pdf?

Given my early exposure to Intel, imagine my delight in getting recruited by Intel to lead the development of Itanium firmware for the Merced CPU in late 1996 and joining the Intel High-End Server Division (HESD) in February 1997 in DuPont WA. The Intel recruiter told me that I could ‘go to Hillsboro for Xeon or Dupont for Itanium.’ I wasn’t familiar w/ any place in the PNW so the obvious choice was to join the Intel 64-bit wave! Prior to joining Intel, I still recall my Compaq manager saying when I served notice “I guess you’re going to Portland Oregon” when in fact I was heading to Washington state. Commencing in ’97 I was now part of the mission to help create the technology behind those great products and standards I’d admired so much.  

Since then, I truly realized the saying of Steve Jobs 'The only way to do great work is to love what you do,' and I've truly loved working alongside such talented and dedicated individuals in this work. That was the missing link from my pre-Intel days, namely the broad experience with Intel employees.

Speaking of people and technology and standards, now more than half my life, or these last 27.5 years at Intel, have more than exceeded my hopes, but it’s the people with whom I’ve collaborated, learned, and grown I appreciate the most.  Thank you all for creating a positive and inspiring work environment. From co-creators of the SAL+NuBiOS & SAL+AMI ‘Salami’ firmware for Merced in HESD, the Workstation Product Group (WPG) Kittyhawk native C code that booted Intel P3 on 840 Rambus and Merced 460GX w/ either the AMI 630 ‘furball’ or the EFI sample as the late-stage payloads. Then off to Microcomputer Software Lab (MSL) in MD6 to work on the hit series of scaling EFI from 0.92 to today’s UEFI 2.11, along with “Tiano” that yielded EDK->EDKII and the Intel Platform innovation Framework for the Extensible Firmware Interface (e.g., “Framework”) specifications that have become the UEFI Platform Initialization (PI) specifications of today. This latter work spanned orgs from MSL to EPG to SEG to SSG to SATG to DEG to my final home here in CCG. I guess the only platform group I missed was embedded, although I enjoyed collaborating with those folks from ACSFL in the late 90’s to today’s slim bootloader.

I suppose I can date the badges by BDE or ADE ('Before drop-e' or 'After drop-e') https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2014/01/advances-in-platform-firmware-beyond.html.

It’s open source platform code like slim bootloader, coreboot, and EDKII features/platforms that have occupied the last 10 years of scaling the Firmware Support Package (FSP), ….. along with the primary mission of FSP to have a clear business boundary between Intel owned versus customer codes. With this last decade also including contributing to NIST 800-193 platform firmware resiliency and recovery.  And and and ….

...and booting.  Measured boot, UEFI Secure boot, ipv6 boot/netboot6, HTTP boot, boot-from-Wifi.....Sometimes I'd use 'booting from a sneaker' as a variant of the Toaster or Fabrikam sort of pedagogic fake device, but given Bluetooth and smart accessories/shoes I suspect this one will fall into the 'life imitates art.'

And I could take a whole detour on security and friends long past. Someone said I was the final member of the below bench to exit. John of PSIRT, Yuriy of threat research, Kirk of all-things-SMM security, ... Zimmer as the UEFI security guy. I still recall a colleague saying 'bring boxes of the Intel Press Beyond BIOS and Shell books. The visitors will love them.' Given the muscle ache from both lugging them down to Portland and back to Seattle I couldn't help but think of the Harold Ramis quote in Ghostbusters that 'print is dead.'  Even those many years ago no one wanted those bulky dead-tree texts.

Beyond the tech milestones, I still recall a few words of wisdom from a now-retired colleague. One was ‘the best architecture is sometimes knowing what to leave out’ (I heard it but didn’t necessarily always practice it) and the other was ‘I don’t know why people don’t get it, but BIOS can be a great career.’  And a great Intel career it has been. Another was ‘the higher leadership ascends you’ll find the more impactful decisions they have to make with successively less information.’  So my take away is that you should take it easy on the bosses, especially in tough times.

And there is my 3-tuple of advice I sometimes give others and myself:  ‘business first, team second, and career third.’  To me this means focus on the business priorities first, even if they transcend your team’s charter. Next help develop and foster a strong team environment for the mission to collaborate on these business challenges.  And a distant third is your career.  I don’t mean to imply career growth is unimportant but more that if you focus on the business priorities and the team, a well-managed company will acknowledge your efforts.  

Also, observe where the interesting problems are being worked and good team cultures exist. Given that insight, when given the opportunity to engage in such focus areas and collaborators it may help your career long term.  And 'keep learning.' This may sound a bit strange coming from me since a boss recently said ‘...and if you don’t want to keep learning then just “retire”.  I personally hope to do both, but the exhortation to 'keep learning' is golden irrespective of one's employer or employment state or age or.....

And given this is a wrap-up sort of blog, I've probably repeated a few themes mentioned before. Some are quite important, though, such as 'it's the people that matter.' Projects and tech come and go. The people are the key invariant of value. For example, sometimes folks think I get excited by books and patents, but it's the co-authors and co-inventors that thrill me. I may forget a book chapter or set of independent claims, but I'll never forget the rich set of colleagues with whom I toiled shoulder-to-shoulder on these endeavors. And these endeavors match my triad of biz/team/career in that they were all done to help further a business strategy, secondarily they entailed team collaboration (sometimes co-authors outside of team or company), and at the end of the day, they may have helped (or hindered) my career arc. As long as I hit #1 and #2, though, I'm at peace.

Other wisdom? Don't bash other technology. I still regret writing 

twenty years ago in  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377810413_TechnologyIntel_Magazine_-_Advances_in_Platform_Firmware_Beyond_BIOS_and_Across_all_Intel_R_Silicon. You win by being good, not by belittling the competition. And the fact that the PC industry for 20+ years had shipped on this 'monolithic', 'space constrained' BIOS rebutted my argument And to be honest, Tiano in 2004 wasn't the exemplar of software quality and stability.

I find a kindred soul in Prof G's advice that 'work life balance is a myth' https://www.raconteur.net/talent-culture/scott-galloway-work-life-balance-work-from-home but the part I perhaps erred on is ignoring the qualifier 'when you are young.' I have kept this unbalance through 3+ decades :) But it has been a great trip and I can see doing more when there are opportunities to dent some more https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/950437-we-re-here-to-put-a-dent-in-the-universe-otherwise.

I not sure what the next phase of the journey will be, but I couldn't help but laugh when reading this cartoon from the New Yorker recently. I sort of put my own spin on it, although some may say it reads well in its original.

And I sure have quite a reading backlog to attack (see background of posts like https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2021/11/books-old-age.html). 

Regarding timing of this event, my Fidelity advisor said 'you can retire but there is the risk of you getting bored.' And a retiring Intel security Fellow opined 'you are too young to retire.' In retrospect I realize that I may be a bit junior to many of the 'retirement' cohort I see exiting since I dove head-first into tech w/o MS+PhD or military or ...et al hang-time. But given the exponential arcs of so much happening in tech and the richness of the world, I suspect I can find many a palliative to the specter of boredom (more 'dent' opportunities - see above).

Speaking of 'fellow,' that was definitely a milestone I had hoped to achieve in my quarter-century tenure at Intel. I try not to be sour grapes and think of the externally-hired-in fellows who only had to align with Professor Galloway's 'it's easy to fall in love with someone for an hour' when comparing external versus internal promotions. Instead I'd say Intel offered many open doors for me and perhaps I simply stumbled into the door jam? It was never aspiring toward the fellow role just for the sake of the title. Instead, I view achieving a fellow promotion as both an acknowledgement of the observed fellow-level impact plus the ability to have more insight into and ability to help advise the business (i.e., a bigger platform to help make those 'dents in the universe').

Regarding that out-of-reach cohort, I did have a chance to leave a small mark for system software next to the Fellows and Senior Fellows, as chronicled in https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2021/07/patents-and-co-inventors.html and https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2022/09/new-milestones.html. Recall the century-milestones I related of:

• Sr. Fellow (13) Glenn Hinton in architecture https://www.anandtech.com/show/16438/new-intel-ceo-making-waves-rehiring-retired-cpu-architects  on 11/06 reached 100 issued US Patents
• Sr. Fellow Robert Chau (13) in process technology https://medium.com/performance-at-intel/a-bright-future-for-moores-law-9adc7d4bd39d  on 3/10 reached 200 issued US Patents
• Sr. Principal Engineer (11) Vincent Zimmer in system firmware on 7/14 reached 300 issued US Patents

From https://levels.fyi

If not fellow, I have at least tried to level up to my 'Senior' taxonomy this year, though, by applying for senior member status of the ACM https://awards.acm.org/senior-members/award-recipients?year=2024&award=159&region=&submit=Submit&isSpecialCategory= 

and the IEEE, respectively

I just made it into 'senior member' under the 30 year milestone of my time with IEEE, for example. So I'm exiting this tech company as a pure-play 'senior' (e.g., Intel Sr. PE, Sr. member ACM, Sr. member IEEE), it seems. What's next on the 'senior' theme?  More senior moments undoubtedly, sliding into senior citizen-hood, ....?

So now to prepare for the next months. One colleague who left from another tech company years ago into Intel told me it took him 2 years to get over leaving his last shop. And another colleague who left Intel for a FAANG company a couple of years ago told me that you fade away quickly from people's memories at Intel, easily within 2 years (2 mos., 2 days, 2 hrs?). So I guess the overlap is 'getting over' job.last and being forgotten by colleagues.last :)

Time.  Time.  As I sit on 12 weeks of accumulated sabbatical (closing in on 16) & a vacation free recent couple of years, I suppose the universe with this 'enhanced retirement package' has finally figured out a way to make me close my Intel laptop lid. And close it I shall. 

In closing, my personal tell is that once I’m done with the meat of a conversation I start philosophizing too much.  And on that note it’s time to end this conversation since my philosophizing has eaten the word budget on this post more than usual.

Thank you all and good-bye,

Vincent

PS if you ever need to contact me, my info is at the top of https://sites.google.com/site/vincentzimmer/cv

Continued march of time

This week I hosted another retirement lunch for an Intel colleague Harry (middle on left-hand-size of the picture below) from the Ridgepointe office, namely the cubicle next to the 2017 denizen described in the http://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-march-of-time.html posting. I caught a picture of a few of the attendees at the nearby buffet, 

luckily for all omitting myself from the photo. A couple of years ago there was talk of manic recruiting, folks reveling in their 'fun-employment' between jobs, quiet quitting, etc.  Now the word 'layoff' permeates the air, with added 'quiet firing,' and folks taking the opportunity to retire. For retirement and the retiree Harry, he was on my interview team back in October 1996 and I still recall his vivid description of underwater hockey and his forays therein. Since then our paths have crossed often through BIOS, Itanium, EFI, UEFI, EDKII..... 

I still remember my first job in the early 90's. I was off-site working with a contractor when at the main campus the layoff message was delivered. When I returned to the office the next day folks had ravaged my cubicle, taking my office supplies, chair, etc. assuming I was part of the RIF. Ah, the cycle of tech.

At the lunch, the fortune cookie I selected seemed appropriate, too, for the eastside tech scene.

Grinding at tech is definitely the mood of the last few decades. Disruptions often make one more thoughtful, though. I am reminded of the quote from Elon Musk that the biggest mistake engineers make is working on the wrong problem, or the image of "Lancelot in Retirement" from Lex Fridman #345. 

Speaking of Leahy and the recent progress in RISC-V I was again reminded of the 2016 coreboot conference https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiWdJ1SEk1_AfMNC6nD_BvUVCIsHq6f0u I mentioned in http://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2016/11/conferences-forums-and-writings.html. Lots of the folks who presented have switched companies, landing at places such as Rivos, Meta, Apple, and Google. But I still giggle when I recall Ron M. mentioning that he had Andrew Waterman https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2016/EECS-2016-1.html speak to the Google executives just to see the latter's expressions when Andrew would drop the F-bomb. Classic tech.

Speaking of Google in PNW and the future of tech, https://www.cs.washington.edu/events/colloquia/details?id=3264 provided some inspiration on the set of open problems to solve

and also offered an oppty to drop in on the new UW CSE building

In the firmware domain there are still interesting problems to solve, including how to better share source code across execution phases. Host firmware is strange, such as PI-based code w/ sec, pei pre mem, pei post mem, dxe pre BdsEntry, dxe post bds (the uefi phase), uefi runtime, smm. And then there are the other platform components like embedded controller (ec), bmc, soc uc's, not to mention other host firmware like slim bootloader, coreboot, u-boot, ....

And to evolve something you need to ship. It was far-sighted on part of Google to use Fuchsia on a class of Nest devices. I recall a lunch w/ MS engineer years about about the Singularity/Midori  OS fail. He claimed the focus was wrong, namely not having a memory safe driver model but instead the lack of focus on the application model. Maybe if it shipped (or provided user-land usages or deployed on MS 1st party devices?

And around Seattle I enjoyed reading Welsh's article https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2023/1/267976-the-end-of-programming/fulltext. This work reminded me of item I studied during my late 90's UW masters on Simonyi's intentional programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_programming.

I have tried to move some of my public-facing posting from https://twitter.com/vincentzimmer to https://mas.to/@vincentzimmer but I continue to find myself replying on the blue bird. From re-tweeting https://twitter.com/acmeducation/status/1636806692519256064 

to answering questions on UEFI firmware, such as making a distinction between interfaces and implementation https://twitter.com/vincentzimmer/status/1633880381610164224

along with not being an apologist for either, with critique of the former https://twitter.com/vincentzimmer/status/1633890390041587712

And finally I reinforced Matthew Garret on his defense of some of the UEFI security features https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/1637661444270587906

with a shout-out to the corresponding embedded computing article https://embeddedcomputing.com/technology/security/software-security/understanding-uefi-firmware-update-and-its-vital-role-in-keeping-computing-systems-secure.

I also dropped into the Dasharo user group and had a chance to talk with Andrew Cooper. He brought up his concern about running UEFI runtime with hardware control-flow enforcement from December 2021 https://osfw.slack.com/archives/CV510QZ0D/p1639105740058800

I let him know that we had implemented this in the UEFI 2.10 specification as part of the UEFI Memory Attributes Table https://uefi.org/specs/UEFI/2.10/04_EFI_System_Table.html#efi-memory-attributes-table. 

The problem statement is described in https://bugzilla.tianocore.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3726

This is another example of using the community to help drive a security feature. The other notable example includes the exchange with Kees Cook on Twitter https://twitter.com/kees_cook/status/1290095780984786952 that led to https://bugzilla.tianocore.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3519 which is now required in https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/hardware-dev-center/new-uefi-ca-memory-mitigation-requirements-for-signing/ba-p/3608714, namely the EFI_MEMORY_ATTRIBUTE_PROTOCOL.

Speaking of the UEFI spec, it has been interesting working across different standards bodies, including IETF https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5970.txt to the various UEFI https://uefi.org/specs/UEFI/2.10/ and UEFI Platform Initialization https://uefi.org/specs/PI/1.8/index.html specifications. Each has a different way to share IPR, from IETF's public https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/ to the UEFI forum's internal sharing. I still recall working w/ the Intel team to draft 

                                

for the PI SMM items. This cites the same SMM patent mentioned in https://www.intel.com/content/dam/develop/public/us/en/documents/a-tour-beyond-bios-launching-standalone-smm-drivers-in-pei-using-the-efi-developer-kit-ii.pdf, viz.,

This work was prior to the standards efforts. And the above document also demonstrated the type of behavior taken post-standards, namely a more public, code-first approach to new work. That document describes what has become the 'stand-alone MM' https://uefi.org/specs/PI/1.8/V4_Overview.html#initializing-mm-standalone-mode-in-sec-phase work in PI 1.8, for example.

Finally, I was hoping to reproduce the stacking image from http://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2021/01/books-and-computers.html for the last couple of Apress books, but I didn't have the energy to hunt all of the books down that have been published since 2006. Instead I opted for the 'COVID Triad', namely the 3 books that appeared between October 2020 and October 2022, viz.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-7939-7 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-7974-8 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-6106-4

That's about 2000pp that appeared on the market in the span of 2 years. Yikes.

A final curious note that also relates to this blog series is 

Someone had posted a link to my BlueHat stream of consciousness blog http://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2023/02/blue-hat-2023-and-uefi-secure-boot.html. I'm glad no one picked up on this since the HN https://news.ycombinator.com/ discussions can get pretty rough.

OK. Enough for Sunday blogging and back to Sunday work.

PS
I was saddened to hear the news of Gordon Moore's passing https://www.moore.org/article-detail?newsUrlName=in-memoriam-gordon-moore-1929-2023. Beyond Moore's Law https://hasler.ece.gatech.edu/Published_papers/Technology_overview/gordon_moore_1965_article.pdf, he provided guidance and wisdom to the industry throughout the years https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtcLzokagAw. My favorite image of him has to be the portrait composed of keycaps 

along with the painting

from Intel HQ alongside Robert Noyce.

books & old age

Let's start out with 'books.'  

When supporting the activity https://community.intel.com/t5/Blogs/Products-and-Solutions/Security/How-Secure-Boot-helps-protect-against-bootkits-used-in-malware/post/1337354 and the linked video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqC332VCgYI I was reminded of my many office-mates during the work-from-home, namely

 

'books.'  I thought that the confinement of working from home would give me more of a chance to catch up with my reading backlog, but invariably the work-load seems to have increased with the time saved from having done my commute.  

Also, the shelves and my person are much more cluttered and in shambles that a similar view from a couple of years back 

(versus today)

I am a bit comforted by this disparity of 'owned' to 'read' books, though, after reading sentiments like Umberto Eco and his anti-library https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilibrary/

"The library should contain as much of what you do not know".  

On that theme of variety, to me it's important to sample the humanities, such as good literature and philosophy, to remind myself what it means to be human, as it is to dive deeply into both my technical domain and the adjacencies. The latter is especially important as innovation often happens at the seams between two domains, and texts that go deep into my domain are often rearview mirror & retrospective, not forward looking. Forward looking includes fusion and leverage of alternate domains into my field.  Think some technique of mathematical logic that can be applied to system software, for example.

Another book that has pleased me during this confinement is "Software Engineering at Google" https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book. Although a read the dead tree version, a colleague let me know this week that there is a free PDF download, too. In addition to leveraging many aspects of the wisdom therein for my day job, such as code review practices, I really enjoyed the 3 'always'.  Always deciding, always scaling, and always leaving. The first helps but not falling into analysis paralysis and admiring problems too long but instead just 'doing something.' The 2nd I use to ensure that my activities can have the largest leverage & impact. And the final one, 'always leaving,' seemed a bit confusing at first blush. Given the 'great resignation' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Resignation and other perennial wars for talent, this struck me as something corporations wouldn't endorse. In closer reading, though, 'always leaving' really means doing your job in a way that you can 'leave' for a broader role, typically within the same organization. In absence of mentoring folks, building a bench, documenting you work, etc., you are stuck in the same role and cannot leave as you may become a Single Point Of Failure (SPOF). The latter is not good for the business, especially given the 'hit by a bus' risk and other reasons someone might leave. Sometime I see folks 'Always digging in' versus 'leaving' where they relish the guru/goto person status and their singular ability to fulfill a role. That's a corporate anti-pattern IMHO. To me I try to embrace this sentiment of always-leaving through well-commented code, documentation (e.g., specifications, design documents, white papers, papers, books, prezo's,....) and most importantly, interaction with colleagues. 

Books are also something of a lifestyle, too. Living in the Seattle area and with the advent of so many online purchasing opportunities, the brick-and-mortar bookstores are becoming rarer. Growing up in Houston I often found refuge in the dusty, disorganized shelf of the local Half-Price Books which was within bicycling distance. Once I could drive, my choices became even broader. After moving to the Pacific Northwest in 1997, my favorite haunt was the Half-Price Books on Roosevelt in the University District in the shadows of UW Seattle. I would often visit that store, both as part of sojourning from the south sound to Seattle for my masters work in the late 90's and as an excuse to go north. The store had the advantage of receiving stock from the local tech worker diaspora and both students and teachers from UW. I miss that haunt https://www.dailyuw.com/opinion/article_33647c22-1a7b-11e7-8490-679e314f85e7.html. Now that my daughter is living on campus at UW, I have a new favorite reason to visit the area, of course. 

So with time things change stores close, and other occurs mark signs of 'old age' increasing.

Another aspect of my biography in the first link above also mentions retro computing. I have regrettably accumulated an original IBM portable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Portable_Personal_Computer, a 21264 Alpha server, an HP dual-socket Itanium, .... and too many more to mention. These computing devices also remind me of the arc of technology. I still recall how I was in awe of companies like DEC in 1988 or so when I was a electrical engineering student at Cornell and many DEC engineers were allowed to take a year off to study for a 'master of engineering' degree at Cornell. I also read about the accomplishments in IEEE journals and even acquired my first IEEE 'student' membership while an undergrad.  Below is a status from my present IEE profile history:

Start Date: 01-Nov-1990 | End Date: 31-Dec-1992 Fast forward to the 21st century and paper https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9218694    Date of Conference: 20-24 July 2020 Almost 30 years from 'student member' to having a publication hosted by an IEEE venue.  Quite the span of time. Given that span of time, you'd think I would generate the energy to apply for 'senior member' or somesuch, but like my career, advancement in that domain seems sluggish these days. Speaking of spans of time, I also just qualified for Intel's 'rule of 75' https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/program/employee/documents/irmp-serma-spd.pdf  Or one of the benefits for 'retiring.'   So now I'm setting on 30 years of retro computing and a tech career with things like 'retirement' options sitting in my inbox.  Quite the passage of time indeed. Speaking of time, better quit blogging here and get back to work.