I worked for them briefly before University, I was essentially the sole report for a handful of senior people who were being dropped in to deliver "Project Genesis". They all told me this was the best place I'd ever work and so far (30+ years later) they're right.

That's also the first place I had something resembling routine access to the Internet, and coincidentally Tim's stupid hypermedia technology (the World Wide Web) was just taking off too so I got to see that brief period when Netscape Navigator is exciting and new.

Apparently Jim Treybig (Tandem founder) was big on people. He came from HP, and brought over the HP (at the time) way. I think a lot of employees even got 6 week paid sabbaticals every 4 years.

I started there as an intern in 1982, and it was my first job out of college. Tandem was Kleiner Perkins's breakthrough: it was the fastest-growing public company in America, and the growth was anticipated and carefully planned for. There were brilliant people everywhere: Jim Gray's office was on the other side of the wall from ours, and Tom Van Vleck, who wrote the first email program for CTSS at MIT, was down the hall. It was the closest to a Manhattan Project I had in my career, and pure luck that I was there.