As recently as a few years ago, Robert was directly answering emails and shipping out signed prints of his BYTE covers. We have had some hanging in our office for inspiration. He set the best tone for what computing feels like.
One I like in particular is Cerebras. Wafer scale didn’t work when wafers were 3” but, somehow, they managed to make it work when they are the size of a manhole cover.
BYTE would run entire issues on the exploits of IBM in POWER and Z, on Intel and AMD’s latest tricks, and on the latest 250TB 2.5” SSDs.
This "more over better" is a natural trend - a lot of money can be made for a relatively low effort. Cerebras did the Really Hard Thing, something many other brilliant companies and people failed at for decades. I remember Gene Amdahl failing at wafer-scale back when wafers were tiny.