Jerry Sanders, Intel rage against the Japanese

OUR OLD MATE Martin Veitch, who works for sister publication IT Week lobs us a hard copy of National Geographic - dateline October 1982 (Vol 162 No 4) - which has all the usual suspects in there, in a long but most interesting feature about Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley before it was Silicon Valley was Prune Valley. According to the piece, written by Moira Johnston and with photos from Charles O'Rear, before there were chips there were prunes - and cherry picking. San Jose (Dullsville) was voted the fastest growing American city in 1980.

In there is a picture of a young and dashing Jerry Sanders III who was fulminating even then. We didn't like it when the AMD beancounters stopped him talking at the Opteron launch a few years back - Jerry was always great value for money and like Grove a refugee from Fairchild.

Here, or rather then, he is fulminating against the Japanese, rather than Intel. "They get hundreds of millions of dollars of free R&D paid for by their government. Then their products arrive here in a flood."

Intel is also incandescent with faux rage about the Japanese. It is just about to launch a DRAM product in Japan - I bet the Dramurai were all a quiver at the thought of Gordon Moore opening his kimono.

There's also a picture of someone called Steve Jobs with lengthy hair, riding a motorbike, and then being interviewed in some vegetarian transport caff sipping tea. My goodness, even Packard and Hewlett are still alive and vibrant with great future ideas for HP which probably included both integrity and invention.

So too we see a pic of Bob Noyce and Ted Hoff, the latter being the geezer that invented the microprocessor.

Bill Gates is barely mentioned.

It's all heart warming stuff but we can't help feeling sorry for the farmers who picked plums that became prunes with only the bunnies to worry about, and not the bunny suits. µ