Intel Corp’s problems with the Pentium bug highlight an awkward fact that doesn’t appear to have sunk in, given the company’s line that all earlier generations of chips have had far more bugs than the Pentium, which is that work now routinely being done on personal computers is of a far higher value than anything that was done five years ago: where previously, if you lost a day’s work because a bug screwed up a set of spreadsheet results, the cost might have been $500 and a lot of irritation, today design work and scientific research processing worth millions of dollars on which lives may depend, work that would previously have been done only on a mainframe or supercomputer, is routinely now done on Pentium-based personal computers.
