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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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.