‘Any bright engineer could have designed the processor. It would probably have been a radically different instruction set, but it would have had Intel’s backing behind it and all PCs today would be based on that architecture instead. I was just lucky enough to have been at the right place at the right time.’

Stephen Morse, the man who gave the world the Intel 8086 microprocessor (and the x86 architecture along with it) was born in Brooklyn, in 1940. Morse was fascinated by electricity from as early as sixth grade and would read any book that he could find on the topic. When the time came, considering his love for electricity and his proficiency in mathematics, a career in Electrical Engineering was the only path that made sense to him (and his mother). He therefore went ahead to get an undergraduate degree, graduate degree (where he first laid hands on a computer) and a PhD, all in Electrical Engineering.

In 1975, Stephen found himself wanting to escape the cold winters of upstate New York and move to the sunny climate of California. This is when he got to know about a relatively unknown computer-on-a-chip designing company called Intel. His experience with microprocessors (and a conversation with his hiring manager about Volkswagen engines) landed him a position at the company.

Intel, straight after the success of the 8080, was looking to design an 8080-compatible chip that could work with 128KB of memory, to beat a competing chip in the mid-range market. This was the project that Stephen was assigned to. Thus the 8086 was born, an architecture that has lived on through many generations and has become the instruction set used by more computers than any other in history. His biggest regret, he says, is that he was not able to name an instruction mnemonic as SEX for Sign-Extend (the instruction was published with the more formal CBW for Convert Byte to Word).

Since retirement in 1979, he has combined his love for computers and his new hobby in genealogy by creating a website with genealogy search tools and has lectured about the topic worldwide. The Beider-Morse Phonetic Name Matching algorithm, which throws fewer false positives than existing Soundex algorithms, is one of his major contributions to the field.

This APOGEE we welcome Stephen Morse, as he shares his experiences and expertise, as Speaker #4 of the Think Again Conclave.