Mannerisms

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.

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

 Two empires once fought to gain supremacy over each other.

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

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

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".

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.

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

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.

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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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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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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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..

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.

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.

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

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.'

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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

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.

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.

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.

When the 20^th 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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'.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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