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August 5, 2008

Fable: The Wonderful Microprocessor

There was once a CEO whose company made a wonderful microprocessor. He was so proud of it that he wanted as many people as possible to use it.

 

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August 12, 2008

Fable: The Lonely Engineer

There was once a lonely engineer in Japan who believed that MOS transistors were the future.

 

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August 19, 2008

Fable: Jaw Or War?

 Two empires once fought to gain supremacy over each other.

 

 

 

 

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August 26, 2008

Fable: Putting Arrogance Before Customers

There was once a company which was highly regarded for its technological excellence. One day, one of its products was found to be faulty.

 

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September 9, 2008

The Paralysis Of Fear

There was once a great company where the middle management were afraid to tell the senior management bad news.

 

 

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November 6, 2008

FABLE: One Innovation Too Many

There was once a very clever man who founded a semiconductor company and produced a very special microprocessor, one that had superior performance to anything on the market, but which was quite unlike anything that had been made before.

 

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October 23, 2008

FABLE: The CEO Who Didn't Look Over The Fence

There was once a CEO who asked his CFO: "How much market share do I need to support my investment in this product line". The CFO replied: "Ten per cent".

 

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October 16, 2008

FABLE: The Wise Man Assailed By Fools

There was once a wise man who started a semiconductor company. He understood the industry, and surrounded himself with the best people in his area. They made superior products which could always find markets at good margins.

 

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October 9, 2008

FABLE: The Footsteps Coming Up Behind You

There was once a great chip company which invented a new product category, semi-custom, and dominated the market for it for a decade.

 

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October 2, 2008

FABLE: The Elusive Digital Business

There was once a great company which was very good at linear ICs. It spent a lot of money trying to get into digital products - so much that many of its best linear people left to form their own linear companies.

 

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September 25, 2008

FABLE: The Persistent Entrepreneur

There was once a persistent entrepreneur who founded a chip company which became, at the time, the fastest growing company Silicon Valley had ever known. It could produce a chip-set replicating a new version of an IBM PC at the same time as IBM could do it and in fewer chips than IBM could do it.

 

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November 12, 2008

Fable: Don't Get Into What You Don't Understand

At the back end of the '60s a new chip company set out to make MOS memories and microprocessors. It brought out the industry standard 16K DRAM, and led the memory market at the 16k and 64k generations.

 

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November 19, 2008

Fable: The Company Which Made The Chips Inside PCs.

There was once a semiconductor company with a simple, successful strategy: To make all the chips inside a PC except the microprocessor and the memory.

 

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January 8, 2008

FABLE: The Company Which Stopped Inventing

There was once an IC company which hit the richest seam of inventiveness ever seen before, or since, in the semiconductor industry.

 

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December 4, 2008

FABLE: The Rejected Pioneer

Programmable logic used to be implemented by a bipolar fuse technology which involved blowing connections on a logic array to customize it.

 

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November 28, 2008

FABLE: The Unsuccessful Genius

There was once a genius who made a fundamental building block which ensured fabulous riches for the electronics industry for sixty years.

 

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December 18, 2008

FABLE: Sauce For The Goose May Not Be Sauce For The Gander

Once upon a time the big companies decided that they would out-source more of their production, cut out basic R&D and follow very closely what their customers in the major markets wanted them to do.

 

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December 23, 2008

FABLE: When The Semiconductor Industry Was Wrong

Many decades ago the semiconductor industry had one thing at the top of its wish-list: a silicon transistor.

 

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January 20, 2009

Fable: The Company With Its Head In The Sand

There was once a pioneering company which had a huge success with a class of computer dubbed a minicomputer.

 

 

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March 26, 2009

FABLE: The Phone Network Nobody Wanted

There was once a company with a magnificent global vision. It would become a global telecommunications operator with everyone on the planet a potential customer.

 

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February 5, 2009

FABLE: The One Trick Pony

Once upon a time, years before the chip was invented, the company which was making more transistors for the open market than anyone else was making them all for a single application - hearing aids.

 

By 1953, the company was making 10,000 junction transistors a month selling for around $9 each. But it never made a transistor for any other application than hearing aids.

 

By 1957, the company still supplied 80 per cent of the market for transistors for hearing aids, but had been overtaken by other companies in total volume of transistors produced.

 

By 1960 the company was no longer a leading player in transistor production.

 

MORAL: A One-Trick Pony Can't Be A Stay-er.

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February 12, 2009

FABLE: The Great Invention Which Got A Lot Of Criticism

There was once a very clever man who invented a device which changed the world and for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

 

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February 19, 2009

FABLE: The Man Who Wanted To Talk To A Machine

A brilliant mathematician and computer pioneer, credited with saving Britain in the Second World War by cracking the Germans' Enigma code, was a genius ahead of his time. But some of his predictions weren't so good.

  

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February 26, 2009

FABLE: The UK Execs Who Trusted A Uniform

There was once a very distinguished UK company which produced the first commercial computer, the first European microprocessor, and invented the semi-custom chip. It was a big contractor to the UK military.

 

 

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March 5, 2009

FABLE: The Company With Too Many Eggs In One Basket

There was once a company which had a business in microprocessors, microcontrollers (called PICs), speech and sound chips, EAROMs and ROMs. When the computer games industry emerged in the 1970s, with a huge appetite for ROMs, this company did extremely well.

 

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March 12, 2009

FABLE: The $250m Square Wafer

The $250m Square Wafer

 

There was once a very famous man who set up a company which aimed to revolutionise the logic in computers.

 

The company had offices in the US and a production plant in Ireland supplied by the Irish Development Authority.

 

The company raised some $250 million in the early 1980s and succeeded in manufacturing a wafer-scale logic circuit on a square wafer.

 

This square wafer was paraded around to the press and potential investors. Most were puzzled by it, but a few companies bought into the concept and put up money.

 

Eventually the whole thing collapsed and the investors lost the lot.

 

MORAL: Reputations are, sometimes, not enough.

July 23, 2009

FABLE: When Gut-Feeling Overrules Market Research

There was once a very great man who co-founded a very great company and, in 1970, he came up with the notion that a pocketable hand-held scientific calculator would be a great product.

 

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April 9, 2009

FABLE: The Vulgar Tycoon

Before the monetary excesses of the late 2000s, came the monetary excesses of the early 2000s and it was at a birthday party in 2001 where an electronics tycoon beat all previous records for vulgarity.

 

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April 16, 2009

FABLE: Even Geniuses Can Be Wrong

One day the greatest man in the semiconductor industry was asked a question by his wife. Should she invest in a start-up company in Cupertino.

 

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April 23, 2009

FABLE: The Incarnation Of Altruism

There once lived a most wonderful man. Not only was he a great intellect but he was described as 'the incarnation of altruism'.

 

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April 30, 2009

FABLE: Glory

There was once a visionary called Geoffrey Dummer. Four years before the invention of the IC he described one and how it might be made and, one year before the IC's invention, a non-working model of an IC based on Dummer's concept was fabricated by Plessey and demonstrated at the 1957 International Symposium on Components in Malvern, Worcestershire.

 

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May 7, 2009

FABLE: The Company Which Needed Two Break-Throughs

There was once a company which aimed to exploit the simultaneous emergence of two complementary new technologies - silicon compilers and direct write e-beam machines.

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May 14, 2009

FABLE: The Company Which Followed Fashion

There was once a company which was famous all over the world as a maker of telecommunications infrastructure equipment. It had a formidable laboratory which was also world-famous inventing optical fibre..

 

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May 21, 2009

FABLE: Adversity Can Be A Positive

There was once a computer company which needed a microprocessor. Its efforts to license one, and to buy one, came to nothing, so it decided to make one. The only thing was that it didn't have much money and didn't have many people.

 

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May 28, 2009

FABLE: Don't Send A Fool On A Delicate Mission

Over forty years ago, one of the great British electronics majors was in talks with one of America's top ten semiconductor companies about merging their semiconductor operations.

 

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June 4, 2009

FABLE: The Technology Company Run By A Banker

There was once a technology company which appointed a banker to run it. Where the rest of the world's technology companies decided, to go slow over a switch from analogue to digital technology, the banker decided to go full steam ahead.

 

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June 11, 2009

FABLE: The Manager Who Avoided Interference

There was once a DRAM operation which, like most DRAM operations, most of the time made a big loss.

 

 

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June 18, 2009

FABLE: The Unclonable PC

Fed up with Chips & Technologies cloning its PC IC designs almost as soon as they came onto the market, IBM announced in April 1987 that its new range of  PS/2 PCs used patent-protected proprietary technology and architectural advances that made them 'unclonable.'

 

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June 25, 2009

FABLE: The Company Which Couldn't Make A 256k DRAM

Back in the 1970s there was a large company which paid $380 million for a semiconductor company which had been the first to market with a 4k DRAM, a 16k DRAM and a 64k DRAM.

 

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July 2, 2009

FABLE: The Company That Depended On One Man

There was once a company founded in 1951 that was a by-word for successfully managing technological transition.

 

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July 9, 2009

FABLE: The Unique CEO

There was once a CEO of Apple Computer who told a Harvard Business School  meeting that his two biggest mistakes were:

 

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July 16, 2009

FABLE: Education For Leisure

Many years ago when the IT industry was young, and the microprocessor was a novelty, and transistor densities and IC performance were doubling every year, a curious consensus emerged:  We would all have to be trained for leisure.

 

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March 19, 2009

FABLE: The CEO Who Talked To Journos

Once upon a time there was a general feeling among UK electronics executives that talking to the press was a mad, bad and dangerous thing to do. Journos, they felt, were rude, crude and socially unattractive.

 

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July 30, 2009

Fable: When America Worried About Not Having Enough DRAMs

At the end of the 1980s, America got worried that it wouldn't have enough DRAMs, so it proposed raising $1 billion to set up a company called US Memories, headed up by an IBM executive, to make DRAMs which had been invented by IBM scientist Robert Dennard.

 

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August 6, 2009

Fable: Leadership Makes The Difference

There were once two semiconductor companies which had combined annual sales of $850 million, combined debts of $650 million, and made a combined annual loss of $200 million. Everyone said: 'Let them die'.

 

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August 13, 2009

Fable: Watch The Book-To-Bill

In 1985 the semiconductor market fell by over 50 per cent from the level of 1984 and four 64k DRAMs sold for a buck.

 

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August 20, 2009

Fable: The Wandering Scientist

A brilliant young scientist once went to work for the world's leading memory company. When a foreign government set up a state-owned IC company, the brilliant young scientist was poached, with his design team, to work for the foreign company.

 

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August 27, 2009

Fable: The Golden Gift Which Was Neglected

The world's top memory company had such a great reputation for manufacturing expertise that the owners of the three most important microprocessors for the succeeding quarter of a century, the 8086, the Z80 and the 68000, gave the memory company second sourcing rights to their microprocessors in return for fab deals.

 

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September 3, 2009

Fable: Consolidation Can be A Negative

There was once a very large company which made cars, but which diversified into many businesses, including the semiconductor business. It ended up owning around half a dozen medium-sized semiconductor companies.

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September 10, 2009

Fable: The Man Who Thought Big

When the 20th century was young, a 23 year-old official with the local electricity utility in Osaka pondered on the inadequacy of the single power plug in most domestic premises.

 

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September 17, 2009

Fable: The Company Which Diluted Its Efforts

54 years ago there was a company which was the No.1 vacuum tube manufacturer in the world and the seventh largest transistor maker, having accomplished that difficult transition with rare success.

 

 

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September 24, 2009

The Oddball Who Built The World's No.2 Computer Company

There was once an oddball who cleverly persuaded his boss to get into the computer business by selling him the idea while the boss was watching a ballet performance - the boss's favourite spectator activity.

 

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October 1, 2009

Fable: The Company That Grew Like A Weed On A Peanuts Investment

There was once a Silicon Valley chip which was the fastest growing IC company in the industry's history.

 

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October 8, 2009

Fable: The Company Which Went Up Against Intel

There was once a company which designed unlicensed second sources of the hottest product in the chip industry. The company had its products made in factories which had been given a factory license by the original design source.

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October 15, 2009

Fable: The Company Which Made Germanium Transistors

There was once a company which achieved the remarkable feat of getting the first junction transistor to market.

 

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October 22, 2009

Fable: You Don't Have To Be Right To Be Rich

Once upon a time, a man stood up in the San Francisco Hilton Hotel and demo'ed an ARM-based computer which drew its programmes off remote servers, sent emails played video clips, did word processing and handled spread sheets.

 

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October 29, 2009

Fable: Nothing's For Sure

In the 1870s it was assumed that, with the discovery of atoms, there was not much more to be discovered about the make-up of matter.

 

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November 5, 2009

Fable: A Flaw's A Flaw

There was once a company which made a widely used, but faulty chip.

 

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November 12, 2009

Fable: When The Steel Industry Went In For ICs.

About 20 years ago, the idea caught hold among the steel-manufacturers of a far-off country that the semiconductor business was a very good business to get into.

 

 

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November 19, 2009

Fable: The Computer Company Which Built Its Own Processor

There was once a computer company which needed a microprocessor. It asked Intel for a licence to the 286 and Intel said 'No'. National's and Motorola's microprocessors were adjudged too slow.

 

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November 26, 2009

Fable: The Company Which Dominated The World In A Decade

In 1990 a young banker was put in charge of an unprofitable cellphone manufacturer with the brief to decide whether it was worth investing in it, or whether it should be sold off.

 

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December 3, 2009

Fable: A Load Of Balls

The strangest semiconductor company ever to emerge in the industry took the view that the future of the industry lay in making semiconductors in the form of round silicon balls.

 In the late 1990s, a group out of TI started a company which raised $52 million to make chips on balls instead of flat die.

 

 

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December 10, 2009

Fable: FPGA Across The Mersey

Once upon a time, a Merseyside glass manufacturer decided to go in for microelectronics. The company invented a fine-grained FPGA technology and had some success in licensing it.

 

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March 11, 2010

Fable: The Genius Engineer Who Moonlighted

There was once a genius engineer who was employed by Zilog, but moonlighted at LSI Logic.

 

 

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December 17, 2009

Fable: The Company Which Pursued Profitless Prosperity

There was once a chip company which got started with the not insignificant capital sum of $1.6 billion.

 

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December 30, 2009

Fable: The Brilliant IC Company Closed Down By Stupidity

Many years ago a British computer company decided it needed controlled access to a proprietary source of chips. In 1966, it set up a facility in Scotland to make RTL and DTL ICs. Later it moved into MOS and made an 8-bit computer using MOS technology.

 

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December 23, 2009

Fable: The Company Which Ignored MOS

There was once a chip company which invented a brand new product type and waxed fat on the proceeds.

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January 7, 2010

Fable: The Company Which Stayed In A Niche.

There was once a spin-off from Intel which decided to name itself after the manner of its genesis - fashioning  an abbreviation from 'Ex-Intel-Corporation'.

 

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January 14, 2010

Fable: The Amazing Father And Son

There was once an amazing father and son. The father founded the most important computer company in the world. The son founded the most important IC company in the world.

 

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January 21, 2010

Fable: The Country Which Bought IC Leadership

There was once a government which wanted its country to be a world-class computer manufacturer.

 

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January 28, 2010

Fable: The Company Which Wants To be No.1

There was once a country which, in 1982, decided that it wanted to have a semiconductor industry and announced a 'Semiconductor Industry Promotion Plan'.

 

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February 4, 2010

Fable: The Devil You Know

There was once a very big company, over 100 years old, which had grown big mainly by taking over its rivals in its domestic market.

 

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February 11, 2010

Fable: The Government Which Backed The Wrong Horse

Back at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s a remarkable transformation was taking place in the UK electronics industry. GEC took over AEI and EE.

 

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February 18, 2010

Fable: The Company Which Sold Out At The Top

There was once a company which had a division which grew to become No.1 in a new product area, but then came to the conclusion that its market was bound to become commoditised.

 

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February 25, 2010

Fable: The Bankrupt Shooting Star

One of the brightest shooting stars in the early PC industry was an American company founded by a Brit in 1980 to manufacture and market portable computers.

 

 

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March 4, 2010

Fable: The Guys Who Trusted Too Much

There were once two guys who became hugely rich by building and selling the most famous microcomputer ever built.

 

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About Fable

This page contains an archive of all entries posted to Mannerisms in the Fable category. They are listed from oldest to newest.

Ed The Serial CEO is the previous category.

FPGA is the next category.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.