INQ top three IT soap characters revealed

When you last tuned in to IT Soap, HP former CEO Carly Fiorina was touting a new book saying the company's board was always crazy, while the former chairwoman Pattie Dunn was facing criminal actions and current CEO Mark Hurd was saying he hadn't properly read plans to spy on journalists and executives to find out who was leaking information.

Meanwhile, we found out that ultra-wealthy board member Tom Perkins had called for HP staff to buy his book "Sex and the Single Zillionaire". That book was written with the backing of Perkins' ex-wife, the romance novelist Danielle Steel…

If you made it up nobody would believe it, but HP folks are not the only soap-opera characters out there, so here is the INQ's guide to our top three soap opera characters from the tech world.

3. Clive Sinclair. Few computer pioneers can say they had journalists at a press conference so impressed that they queued up to pre-order the product but that was the case when Sir Clive Marles Sinclair launched the QL. Sinclair promised to create a very British computer-industry powerhouse but even the eventual fading of the venture did not stop his mania for inventing.

At the age of 10 he was told his school couldn't teach him more about mathematics and as a teenager he developed a fascination with electronics. He founded his first company before his A-levels and by 18 was editor of Practical Wireless. In his mid-thirties he launched the Sinclair ZX80 and a year later the ZX81, selling 300,000 units in one year. The ZX Spectrum followed quickly, by which time Sinclair had fostered a large cottage industry in publishing, add-ons and much else.

However, later ventures were not so successful. The C5 personal transporter was widely mocked with one cartoon showing a driver telling a policeman: "Honestly, I wasn't kerb-crawling, this is as fast as it goes."

Sinclair followed up with other ventures including a radio that fitted in the ear and the fold-up A-bike and has become a notable player in celebrity poker competitions as well as unofficial national treasure.

2. Dennis Hayes. For anybody over the age of 30, Dennis Hayes is synonymous with the modem. Having invented the AT command set, his eponymous company created an industry where low-cost clone makers could flourish. At his zenith, Hayes hosted lavish parties, sponsored concerts and collected Ansel Adams prints.

However, Hayes was eventually usurped by cheaper rivals and the company went into Chapter 11 in 1994, just at the PC world's most important trade show, Comdex in Las Vegas, was kicking off. Dennis Hayes also suffered a very public personal reverse as his very expensive divorce from wife Melita was splashed all over the media. Hayes was later to divorce a second wife.

The firm was eventually sold in the late 1990s and the sale led indirectly to Hayes setting up in the music-bar/restaurant trade back in his native Atlanta. "We did a lot of renovations there," Hayes told reporters. "We painted the whole place black." The place burned down in 2000.

Diagnosed with a disease affecting his sight in the 1980s, Hayes has become a spokesman for the internet accessibility movement.

The perfect Southern gentleman, he was in the habit of sending personal letters thanking journalists for taking the time to interview him.

1. Jerry Sanders. Stories about AMD founder Walter J. Sanders are legion and frequently apocryphal. They include the notion that while working as a salesman at Fairchild he once attended a meeting with IBM wearing a pink suit. Sanders denied the story but he did drive a pink Rolls Royce.

Another story has it that Sanders was badly beaten up as an 18-year-old after a fight broke out over a girl. Years later, Sanders was told by a palmist that he had two lifelines. One extended one hundred years, the other just 18 years.

In interviews, Sanders has described his upbringing in a broken home and how his grandfather called him a "shanty Irishman" creating a resolve to prove he could be a success. That resolve came in handy in the many subsequent years fighting the good fight against a much larger Intel.

An early-1980s National Geographic article about the burgeoning importance of the silicon chip depicts him driving a convertible sports car, sporting generous facial hair and gold sunglasses with drilled arms and suggesting that your bank balance is life's report card.

On winning a key legal battle with Intel that let AMD reverse-engineer x86 designs, Sanders cited the poet Robert Browning: "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"

Written off as an also ran numerous times, AMD is today run by Sanders' protégé Hector Ruiz and has never been stronger. µ