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.

.

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.

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.

.

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.

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.