I've seen Xerox (neat graphics stuff) and Stanford's AI lab (a neat place in a neat area), skipped SRI Stanford Research Center to go to Illiac (didn't see machine though). That turned into a real interview, bouncing around from person to person - sort of "Alice's Restaurant" type inspected, injected, neglected stuff. They kept me so long I got to San Jose after a camera store that was going to sell me a 28 mm lens had closed, but stumbled across an open store that sold me the one for the same price.

Illiac took me to lunch, sort of. Instead of the people interviewing me taking me, they got a systems programmer from the project (female, single) to go.

What started as me looking at Intel has turned into Intel coming at me. I'm meeting with one of them today and I think will have no trouble getting an offer from them (Illiac said $16K).

Boy, I though I escaped all the hecticness of C-MU by coming out here....

1974: One goal of the trip was "job site hunting," as in "I gotta get out of Pittsburgh, where would I like to go?" Obviously, Silicon Valley was high on that list by virtue of all the computer companies that were located there. All these sites, except Intel, were on the ARPAnet, and staying part of the ARPAnet community was very desirable.

After the trip and moving to New England, I did have some other discussions and trips to Xerox, but when I wanted to go there, they weren't interested, and when they were, I wasn't.

I don't remember airlines providing stationery, I wonder when they stopped that. In 1974 there was still some effort to make flying a special experience. A couple years later on a crisis business trip to Santa Barbara, coach was full, on my Jan 2nd flight, so I had to fly first class. Let's just say the trip began looking up with dinner on the flight - Chateau Briand, medium-rare, with leftovers about twice the size of the first serving.

2009: As you will see, the Intel job didn't happen. At the time Intel was just at the beginning of its long rise to dominance in the processor field. While I knew them mainly from the RAM they made then, and the potential job involved working on a DEC PDP-10 that supported a lot of the company, I don't know what would have happened had I joined them, or any of the other businesses I talked to.