Fable

In 1910 a PhD student used the term ‘Halbleiter’ in his thesis which christened an industry which was not to be invented for another 36 years. The student’s teacher had drawn his attention to a third material alongside insulators and conductors which had variable properties. Moral: Possibilities precede probabilities 

That was once a group of IC designers who were poached by a start-up. When their previous employers sued them, they agreed to come back but as independent contractors. One of the designers had a college mate with a rich Dad who offered to set them up as an independent  company. Nowadays, in a good year, the company makes it ...

A  shoe-shine boy who later introduced the “Texas Hot” ( a hot dog with chili sauce) to Wellsville, New York and participated in the liberation of Dachau in WWII bought multiple cable TV companies becoming the biggest US cable TV provider outside Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and South Florida with systems reaching over 30 states and over 5.6 million customers He ...

There was once a CEO famous for his ten gallon hats and cowboy boots who founded a company which bought over 60 telecoms companies. and had a market cap at its peak of $186 billion. For one quarter, in which it made a loss, it reported a net profit of $1.38 billion.  He borrowed $408 million from the company to ...

There was once a CEO who spent $2 million on his wife’s birthday party and charged half to the company. It was an excellent bash, held in Sardinia, which included an ice statue of David which had vodka coming out of his cock. For this, and other, misuses of company funds he did six and a half tears in pokey. ...

A contemporary of Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain at Bell Labs at the time they invented the transistor was sufficiently intrigued by the invention to take a few home one weekend to play with. They were relatively low-gain devices and he thought that if he paired two they would behave like one transistor but with more current gain. He thought the ...

24 years ago a microprocessor was designed in Germany which combined a RISC architecture with a DSP architecture which it marketed both as a chip and as IP. The processor was used, among other things, in camera chips, MCUs for SSDs, and flash controllers. Moral: Versatility Supports Longevity

40 years ago a UK semiconductor company went in for manufacturing a magnetics-based memory invented in the 1970s. Four years later the management team running the memory unit bought it out and set up a new company to make the memories which moved to Towcester. Nine years later on, the operation was acquired by GE of the US. The technology ...

In the late 1980s, when the Japanese semiconductor companies ruled the world, the executives of a steel manufacturing company in Japan looked enviously at the semiconductor industry with its 20% growth rates compared to their flat or negative growth rate. The execs reckoned that the semiconductor industry was very like their own industry  – process driven with a large capex ...

Once upon a time there was an ambitious startup which decided to compete in the DRAM, SRAM, E2PROM and microprocessor markets. It built two fabs and made some successful memories and a microprocessor which required its own programming language and was so unique that none of the big applications for microprocessors decided to use it. The company spawned many startups ...