Mannerisms

"I kept turning down Cambridge start-ups because I thought Cambridge didn't have much business credibility", remembers Saxby, "but when I heard that Apple was involved I became interested, because Apple had been both a technology success and a business success."

The job was to head up a team of Acorn's IC design engineers who wanted to go independent and market the expertise they had gained at Acorn in designing the ICs inside the Acorn Computer.

The designers thought they could sell their expertise to other companies and formed a start-up company, backed by both Acorn and Apple, called Advanced RISC Machines or ARM.

The downside to the ARM proposition was that the design team's speciality was microprocessors - and the number of failed microprocessors is legion.

So, although Acorn and Apple offered him the job, it was a highly risky one to accept.

Saxby's daughter Katy, then 11, decided it for him.

"I've got a dice here", she told her father, "throw it, and if you get a six, you'll become a millionaire."

Saxby threw a six.

That sustained him through the next two, very difficult, years. "At the low points, I felt:  'At least I threw that six'."

SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND -  Monday morning's Poll is:  What was the worst-ever semiconductor industry decision?