Recently in Fable Category

Fable: The Company Which Couldn't Build MOS

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Once upon a time, the largest and most famous company in the IC industry tried to get a handle on a new technology - MOS.

Fable: The Futures Catalogue

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Once upon a time a company produced a 'Futures Catalogue'. It ran to 100 pages and included detailed specifications of all the company's future products.

Fable: The Power Of A Great Tradition

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Back in the century before last, a very great engineering company invented the first automatic dial telegraph, the water meter and the electric dynamo.

Fable: Waxing And Waning

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Back at the end of the century before last, a couple of brothers started making light bulbs.

The MOS Pioneer Which Got Screwed.

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There was once a far-sighted government which, in 1967, gave one of its semiconductor companies a contract to instal an MOS process (a year before Intel was founded expressly to develop MOS memory).

The American semiconductor industry went through turbulent times between 1978 and 1988.

Fable: The Persistent American Company

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At a time when no foreign company had ever been allowed to build a fab in Japan, there was an American company which was extremely persistent in its efforts to get the Japanese authorities to give approval.

Fable: The Poet CEO

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There was once a company which spun out of Seeq which had spun out of Intel and set out to make E².

Fable: The Hand Of History

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36 years ago, hit by the plummeting calculator price, a New Mexico calculator company was about to go bust.

Fable: Fortune's Fickle Finger Of Fate

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32 years ago a big company paid $380 million for a chip company. It seemed a bargain when, the following year, the chip company had sales of $370 million. But then things went wrong.

There was once a company making x86 microprocessors in Mission College Boulevard, Santa Clara.

Fable: The Company Which Tried To Catch Up

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In late 1981, when it launched its 64K DRAM, the company was four years behind the industry leader.

Fable: The Company Which Couldn't Hack It

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In 1968 the dominant player in the UK chip industry closed down a chip manufacturing  joint venture with Philips Semiconductors.

Fable: The Lab Which Built A Nation's Success

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There was once a laboratory which set itself the aspiration if making its country a major player in the chip market.

Fable: The Genius Who Was Ousted

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The inventor of the EEPROM left Intel to co-found a chip company in Silicon Valley and then left that company to found his own start-up.

Fable: The Company With A Good Name

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There was once a company which manufactured the world's first ever model of an IC. The company had a very fast bipolar process which it used to make ICs which were higher performance than anything else on the market and so attracted premium prices.

Fable: The Journo Who Became An Inventor

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There was once a journalist who wanted to be an inventor.

Fable: When Beer Was Not Enough

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There was once a brewer's son who went into the Navy and became a lieutenant.

Fable: Fragile Fortune

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There was once a company whose value, measured by market cap, grew 2,300% between 1995 and 2000.

Fable: The Ubiquitous Microprocessor Which Wasn't

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The Governor of one of the world's major capital cities once accused a government minister of killing off a microprocessor architecture because of American pressure fuelled by Microsoft's lobbying.

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