Recently in yarns Category

Recently the big-wigs of US high-tech and academia held a forum in Oregon bemoaning the lack of engineers.

In his fine History of Semiconductor Engineering, Bo Lojek tells how the Motorola guys brought into Fairchild after Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove left to found Intel, had a name for the Fairchild marketing team led by Jerry Sanders III, later to found AMD.

John East was, for 22 years, CEO of Actel. His first job was at Fairchild in the Wild West days of the Silicon Frontier.

Hans Snook, Founder of Orange, tells how the back-packing trail was a great recruitment vehicle for Hutchison, Orange's backer.

John East was, for 22 years, CEO of Actel. His first job was at Fairchild in the Wild West days of the Silicon Frontier.

Fifteen years ago, eminent businessmen were warning that Europe had to adjust to the rise of China.

When you look at the sorry tale of NXP - the old Philips Semiconductors operation which was sold to private equity -  it's good to remember the days when Philips Semis was the star in the Philips firmament.

We tend to think that debt is a recent aberration but, back in 1998, the Asian Contagion led to several Asian countries requiring the bail-out services of the IMF.

Psion started life as a software publisher but founder, David Potter, always wanted to make his own products.

One of those weird things about consumer electronics is that pocket TVs never took off. Pocket radios were a huge; pocket music players were stonking sellers;  pocket telephones are a ginormous market; but no one ever really wanted a pocket TV.

One of the greatest Prime Ministers we never had, Dennis Healey, briefly, very briefly, considered joining the electronics industry.

In 1816, Francis Ronalds built an electric telegraph in the garden of his house in Hammersmith. It used clockwork-driven rotating dials, engraved with letters of the alphabet and numbers, at both ends of a circuit. His dials were connected by almost 13km of charged iron wire hung between two wooden frames.

I once sat on a panel with a wise old Intel owl.

William Cooke, inventor of a railway telegraph system, and Charles Wheatstone, inventor of the concertina and the portable harmonium, claimed credit for inventing the telegraph.

Orange was a phenomenon. Eight years after launch it was sold for £30 billion.

Ulrich Schumachger and Hermann Hauser had the same idea when they ran Infineon and Acorn respectively - dinner.

Brilliant people can be a pain. In his book 'High Sta@kes No Prisoners', Charles Ferguson, founder and president of Vermeer Technologies, tells how he hired a super-star techie in the start-up days.

In 1917 the wireless operators and cryptographers of  'Room 40' intercepted and decoded a telegram.

In the early 1980s Siemens, the biggest engineering company in Europe, decided it needed to be world-class in chip engineering.