Fairchild Semiconductor (9/1985-3/1988)

Fairchild Semiconductor introduced the first commercially available integrated circuit (although at almost the same time as one from Texas Instruments), and would go on to become one of the major players in the evolution of Silicon Valley in the 1960s. The company currently employs roughly ten thousand people worldwide, with locations in San José, California, Bucheon, Korea, and Cebu, Philippines, among others. In South Portland, Maine, the corporate headquarters is located in the Maine Mall area, about a third of a mile from the manufacturing plant.

History

In 1956 William Shockley opened Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory as a division of Beckman Instruments in Mountain View; his plan was to develop a new type of "4-layer diode" that would work faster and have more uses than current transistors. At first he attempted to hire some of his former colleagues from Bell Labs, but none were willing to move to the West Coast or work with Shockley again. Instead he founded the core of a new company in the best and brightest new graduates coming out of the engineering schools.

Only a year later the staff was already fed up with Shockley's increasingly bizarre behavior. In one famous incident Shockley's secretary accidentally cut her finger and he became convinced it was a plot against him. He then ordered everyone in the company to take a lie detector test to track down the culprit. It was later demonstrated she had cut herself on a broken thumbtack and Shockley calmed down, but the damage was already done. This had proven to be a decisive example to several key personnel of Shockley's increasing paranoia, and a group of eight engineers decided they had had enough.

The group, later known widely as the Traitorous Eight, decided they had reason enough to resign, and all did so. The eight men were Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts. Looking for funding on their own project, they turned to Sherman Fairchild's Fairchild Camera and Instrument, an Eastern U.S. company with considerable military contracts. In 1957 Fairchild Semiconductor was started with plans on making silicon transistors — at the time germanium was still a common material for semiconductor use.

Their first transistors were soon on the market, and the first batch of 100 was sold to IBM for $150 a piece. However, only two years later they had managed to build a circuit with four transistors on a single wafer of silicon, thereby creating the first silicon integrated circuit. (Texas Instruments' Jack Kilby had developed an integrated circuit made of germanium on September 12, 1958, and was awarded a U.S. patent). The company grew from twelve to twelve thousand employees, and was soon making $130 million a year.

During the 1960s, Fairchild dominated the analog integrated circuit market, introducing the first IC operational amplifiers, or "op amps", Bob Widlar's 702 (in 1964) and 709. In 1968, David Fullagar's 741 was introduced, which became the most popular IC op amp of all time.

During the 1960s many of the original founders would leave Fairchild to strike out on their own. Known as the "fairchildren", they formed many of the companies that grew to prominence in the 1970s. A Fairchild advertisement of the time showed a collage of the logos of Silicon Valley with the annotation "We started it all.". Among the last of the original founders to leave were Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, who left in 1968 to form Intel. At this point much of the brainpower of the company was gone.

Intel would soon introduce its microprocessor, which Fairchild only copied, poorly, after a few years as the Fairchild F8. Their original huge lead was now squandered. By the end of the 1970s they had no new products in the pipeline, and increasingly turned to niche markets with their existing product line, notably "hardened" integrated circuits for military and space applications.

For a time, the company played a leading role in the development of integrated circuits using bipolar technology. These circuits were used worldwide, notably in Cray supercomputers.

Fairchild also lead the way in the development of digital imaging. In 1973 they were the first to produce a commercial Charge-coupled device following up on the invention at Bell Labs. In 1976 the company released the first video game system to use ROM cartridges, the Channel F.

In the 1970s Fairchild increasingly turned to "high end" customers, and thereby lost out in the developing microprocessor market. In 1979, Fairchild was purchased by Schlumberger Limited, an oil field services company. By the late 1980s the company was in a relatively-weak competitive position; Schlumberger sold Fairchild to National Semiconductor in 1987.[1]

In 1997 Fairchild Semiconductor was reborn as an independent company, based in South Portland, Maine. In 1999 Fairchild Semiconductor again became a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker symbol FCS. Fairchild's South Portland, Maine location is the longest continuously operating semiconductor manufacturing facility in the world.

More recently, Fairchild has expanded its semiconductor manufacturing to include a foundry service for advanced MEMS devices and products.

Fairchild's current product line is aimed at the power and discrete component market, claiming the ability to supply every single semiconductor component required for a typical switched-mode power supply from controller chip to switching MOSFET to rectifier diodes to optocouplers.

Digital Equipment Corporation (4/1988-6/1998)

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering company in the American computer industry. They are generally referred to within the computing industry as DEC, despite rebranding themselves as Digital. They were later acquired by Compaq, who subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard. As of 2003 their product lines are still produced under the HP name.

Though DEC does not exist anymore, its logo is very much alive. It is now the logo of Digital GlobalSoft a well respected IT services company in India. Earlier this company was a 51 % subsidiary of DEC. Now it is a part of HP.

History

The company was founded in 1957 by Ken Olsen, a Massachusetts engineer who had been working at Lincoln Labs on the TX-2 project. The TX-2 was a transistor-based computer using a large amount of core memory. When that project ran into difficulties, Olsen left to form DEC. At the time the market was hostile to computer companies, and investors shied from their plans. Instead they started building small digital "blocks" (each effectively a single component from the TX-2 design) that could be combined together to be used in a lab setting. In 1961 the company was making a profit, and started construction of their first computer, the PDP-1.

Through the 1960s DEC produced a series of machines aimed at a price/performance point below IBM's mainframe machines, typically based on an 18-bit word, using core memory. True success followed with the introduction of the famous PDP-8 in 1964. It was a smaller 12-bit word machine that sold for about $16,000. The PDP-8 was small enough to fit on a cart. It was simple enough to be used for many roles, and they soon started being sold in huge numbers to new market niches, labs, railways, and all sorts of industrial applications. Today the PDP-8 is generally regarded as the first minicomputer.

The PDP-8 was important historically because it was the first computer that was regularly purchased by a handful of end users as an alternative to using a larger system in a data center. Because of their low cost and portability, these machines could be purchased to fill a specific need, unlike the mainframe systems of the day that were nearly always shared among diverse users.

The PDP-8 had a limited instruction set and lacked the memory protection hardware required for a time sharing system.

Last of the famous machines in the PDP series was the PDP-11, which switched to a 16-bit word now that everyone in the computer industry was using ASCII. PDP-11 machines started in the market essentially as upscale PDP-8s, but as improvements to integrated circuits continued, they eventually were packaged in cases no larger than a modern PC. Their larger PDP-10 cousins, which used a 36-bit architecture, were aimed at data-processing centers instead, eventually being sold as the DECsystem 10 and 20. While the PDP-11 systems supported several operating system of the day, including DEC's RSTS system, their most important role was to run Bell Labs' new UNIX operating system that was being made available to educational institutions. These PDP-11 systems were destined to be the sandbox for a generation of computer scientists.

The PDP-11 had a 64K address space. Most models had a paged architecture and memory protection features to allow timesharing, and could support split Instruction & Data architectures for an effective address size of 128K.

In 1976 DEC decided to move to an entirely new 32-bit platform, which they referred to as the super-mini. They released this as the VAX 11/780 in 1978, and immediately took over the vast majority of the minicomputer market. Desperate attempts by competitors such as Data General (which had been formed in 1968 by a former DEC engineer who had worked on a 16-bit design that DEC had rejected) to win back market share failed, due not only to DEC's successes, but the emergence of the microcomputer and workstation into the lower-end of the minicomputer market. In 1983, DEC cancelled their "Jupiter" project, which had been intended to build a successor to the PDP-10, and instead focused on promoting the VAX as their flagship model.

The VAX series had an instruction set that is rich even by today's standards (as well as an abundance of addressing modes). In addition to the paging and memory protection features of the PDP series, the VAX supported virtual memory. The VAX could use both UNIX and DEC's own VMS operating system.

At its peak in the late 1980s, Digital was the second-largest computer company in the world, with over 100,000 employees. It was during this time that they appeared to gain a feeling of invincibility, and branched out into software, producing products for almost every then "hot" niche. This included their own networking system, DECnet, file and print sharing, relational database, and even transaction processing. Although many of these products were well designed, most of them were DEC-only or DEC-centric, and customers frequently ignored them and used 3rd party products instead. This problem was further magnified by Olsen's aversion to advertising and his belief that well-engineered products would sell themselves. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on these projects, at the same time that workstations based on RISC architecture were starting to approach the VAX in performance. In the early 1990s DEC "suddenly" found its sales faltering, and DECs first layoffs followed.

Their response was to design a single microprocessor with 64-bit RISC architecture (as opposed to the 32-bit CISC architecture used in the VAX) that could be used both in the servers, as well as a workstation line of their own. The result was the Alpha processor, which held the performance crown into the year 2000's. The Alpha-based computers (AlphaServer) was able to run VMS, UNIX and Microsoft's new server operating system NT. DEC also tried to compete in the Unix market by marketing the VMS operating system as "OpenVMS" and by selling their own Unix (OSF1, later renamed to Tru64), and it began to advertise more aggressively. DEC was simply not prepared to sell into a crowded Unix market however and furthermore the low end PC-servers running NT (based on Intel processors) took marketshare from Alpha-based computers. DEC's workstation and server line never gained much popularity beyond former DEC customers.

Ken Olsen was replaced by Robert Palmer as the company's CEO, but Palmer was unable to stave the tide of red ink and more rounds of layoffs ensued. DEC's database product was sold to Oracle. In May 1997 DEC sued Intel for allegedly infringing on its Alpha patents in designing the Pentium chips. The settlement resulted in DECs chip business being sold to Intel, its networking business being sold to Cabletron, and eventually the company itself being sold to Compaq on January 26, 1998. Compaq itself was taken over by Hewlett-Packard in 2002.

Accomplishments

Digital supported the ANSI standards, especially the ASCII character set, which survive in Unicode and the ISO character set. This finessed EBCDIC. Digital's own Multinational Character Set also had a large influence on the Latin-1 characters in ISO 8859-1 and Unicode.

The first versions of the C programming language and the UNIX system ran on Digital's PDP series of computers (first on a PDP-7, then the PDP-11's), which were the first commercially viable minicomputers.

Digital also produced the popular VAX computer family, the Alpha (AXP) microprocessor (the first commercially available 64-bit microprocessor), the first commercially successful workstation (the VT-78), and some commercially unsuccessful personal computers including the DEC One, the first laptop computer and the first MS-DOS computer to use 3 1/2" floppy disks, which were later to become an industry standard.

Digital produced top-line operating systems, like OS-8, RT-11, RSX-11 and VMS. PDP computers, in particular the PDP-11 model, inspired a generation of programmers and software developers. Some PDP-11 systems more than 25 years old (software and hardware) are still being used (as of 2003) to control and monitor factories, transportations systems and nuclear plants. VAX and Micro-VAX computers (very widespread in the 1980s) running VMS formed one of the most important pre-Internet networks, DECnet, which mixed business and research facilities.

Digital was the first commercial business connected to the Internet, digital.com being one of the first of the now ubiquitous .com domains.

The popular AltaVista, created by Digital, was one of the first comprehensive Internet search engines (although Lycos was earlier, it was much more limited).

Cybernet Internet Dienstleistungen AG (7/1998-10/1999)

(Information only available in German language)
Cybernet Internet-Dienstleistungen AG, Berlin/München, war die erste Aktiengesellschaft für Electronic Business in Deutschland. Die 1995 gegründete Cybernet AG bot ihren mittelständischen Kunden ein modulares, bedarfsorientiertes und individuelles Electronic Business System an. Unter dem Motto "Bausteine, die verbinden" waren drei Electronic Business Lines - "Integr@tedWork", "Integr@tedBusiness" und "Integr@tedCommunications" - zu einer kompletten Lösung für die digitale Kommunikation der Unternehmen zusammengefasst.

Mit dem Claim "The Communication People" positionierte sich die Cybernet AG für mehr als 20.000 Kunden als servicebewußter, leistungsstarker und wegweisender Anbieter für Electronic Business für den Mittelstand in Deutschland. Mit diesem Konzept bekamen die Kunden der Cybernet AG individuelle, investitionssichere und schnell integrierbare System-Bausteine aus einer Hand, mit denen sie die Erfolgspotentiale digitaler Kommunikationsprozesse optimal nutzen konnten.

Die Cybernet Internet Services International, Inc., USA war die Muttergesellschaft der Cybernet AG.

2002 übernahm PSINet Kunden, Mitarbeiter und Infrastruktur der Cybernet Internet-Dienstleistungen AG.

Linux Information Systems AG (11/1999-12/2001)

(Information only available in German language)
Die Linux Information Systems AG bietet einen umfangreichen Erfahrungshintergrund aus der Linuxbranche. Seit 1992 realisieren Mitarbeiter der AG Kundenprojekte mit Linux. Für die Kunden werden von Netzwerkservern bis hin zu umfangreichen Datenbankservern und RAID-Systemen unterschiedlichste Systeme projektiert, beraten und realisiert. Die Entwicklung und Projektierung von Software und die Beratung von Unternehmen für linuxbasierte Lösungen gehören zum fokussierten Leistungsspektrum.

Service als Unternehmenskultur

Die Linux Information Systems AG pflegt Dienstleistung und Service als Unternehmenskultur im Dienst des Kunden. Dazu gehören klare Aussagen und realitätsnahe Einschätzungen Ihrer Projektidee. Ebenso wie transparente Preisgestaltung. Damit ist die Linux Information Systems AG ein kalkulierbarer Partner.

Erfahrung im Projektmanagement

Die Linux AG begleitet den Kunden von der ersten Idee bis zum Betrieb des Produkts. Sie bietet eine komplette und umfassende Betreuung durch professionelle Projektleiter und Projekt-Teams. Ausführliche Beratungsgespräche mit Consultants über Machbarkeiten und Möglichkeiten sichern eine realisitsche, kostengünstige Einschätzung des Projekts. Mit einem kompetenten, erfahrenem Team wird in Kundenprojekten der Erfolg gesichert.

intersoft AG (6/2002-now)

(Information only available in German language)
Seit Gründung im Jahr 1990 hat sich die intersoft AG auf den Finanzdienstleistungssektor konzentriert. Ziel des unabhängigen Hamburger Softwarehauses ist es, kostengünstige, flexible IT-Lösungen anzubieten, die hoch integrierbar und revisionssicher sind, um damit Prozesse zu optimieren und Nachhaltigkeit zu schaffen. Das Kerngeschäft ist die Entwicklung von Standardsoftware für Versicherungen. Mit der modular aufgebauten Standardsoftware lifestream® bietet die intersoft AG eine einzigartige spartenübergreifende Lösung.

Des Weiteren berät die intersoft AG im aktuariellen Bereich und bietet Beratungsleistungen in den Fachbereichen IT-Sicherheit und Datenschutz an.