A Time of Convergence
From about 1990 to 2008 the tech industry exuded a palpable sense that breakthroughs were coming, that one or multiple Next Big Things were just over the horizon. It was just a question of who would be the first to see and seize the opportunities.
The PC was clearly coming on strong as a next-big thing, but it had yet to fulfill its potential of delivering truly powerful, yet easy-to-use and inexpensive products that rode a fast, reliable network. And we all wanted at least one product that would fit in a pocket, but it was unclear if it would come from the PC industry, phone makers or consumer electronics giants.
At the same time, consumer electronics companies were pushing graphics and displays to the hilt in pursuit of more realistic game consoles and TVs. The gaming sector, for its part, was on a course to overtake movies and TV as the largest entertainment market.
Meanwhile, service providers were racing to retool their networks to be both fast and smart (digital); most were still slow and analog (dumb).
In the 1980s, a court order split the U.S. telephone monopoly into seven regional companies meant to be more entrepreneurial. Their skinny networks linked the vast majority of Americans, but lacked the muscle to carry video.
By contrast, cable TV providers were on the rise with networks built to deliver video, but they were one-way, typically regional, connections. These generally low-tech companies were trying to retool their networks to handle two-way links that could provide coverage nationwide.
Satellite ventures aimed to beat both the phone and cable companies in delivering a mix of video and/or phone services. But they had to launch and remotely manage dozens, even hundreds, of powerful systems to carry signals and design a back channel for two-way comms.
Meanwhile folks like U.S. Vice President Al Gore were just starting to popularize the idea of the “information superhighway.” The internet was still a relatively closed, limited network linking a few hundred thousand people, mainly at government research and academic supercomputer centers. That reflected the internet’s original designed goal of serving the military. But it was quickly opening up, advancing toward commercial uses and on the way to linking tens of millions of computers within a few years.
All these ambitious concepts required new kinds of systems packing ever smaller, faster, cheaper chips, products the semiconductor engineers in our readership were working at break-neck speed to deliver.
In the great race to be first, everyone was striking alliances with everyone else to get an edge. Chip, systems, software and service companies were forging partnerships around crude prototypes and lofty visions. Startups were sprouting around every new concept and emerging technology in the labs. Everything seemed possible, so anyone with money and an interest in tech was laying a bet on something or someone hitting big.
The word for this spicy tech stew was convergence. Girish had smartly defined OEM as the magazine covering convergence for an expanding group of players who wanted a piece of it.
Convergence was the bubbling froth of an intoxicated industry in the go-go years of a global economic expansion. In the days before the World Wide Web, print publications like EE Times swelled with that yeast. In its peak years before the turn of the century, the newspaper raked in revenues of more than $50 million a year. Girish saw OEM Magazine as another spoon to scoop up a bit more of the bubbling business.
“The promise of vast new ‘infotainment’ markets is tempered by a host of unanswered questions: What will the network look like? Who will run it? And what will people use it for?”
Indeed, as we recounted in issue after issue, neither the chips nor the networks nor the displays nor the storage devices of that day were up to the ambitious mirages visionaries were painting. Getting to the imagined nerd nirvana would take another 15 years, and by then OEM would be long gone.
At least four staff editors scrambled to report the cover story. It was such a hodge podge that before it was done Weitzner took a crack at rewriting it. When we all felt it was still short of the mark, we punted it to Henkel in a hail Mary for one more rewrite of our rewrites. Just before it went to print, I made a few last tweaks, cutting Henkel’s language about a “battle royale.”
The story featured a graphic of an imaginary “home dream machine” showing the chips that might play a role inside it. The idea, after all, was to make our chip advertisers salivate for the concept and reserve more space in our pages. They did. We snagged nearly three dozen advertisers for the first issue, a couple taking multiple two-page spreads. When you dropped it on your desk, the 100+page magazine had what CMP publishers like Weitzner called “a good plunk factor.”
Each issue sported a Playboy-style Q&A interview with a tech celebrity. The first subject, Hermann Hauser (at bottom), was a serial entrepreneur who helped found ARM, then a small but up-and-coming processor company. He also served as co-chair and CTO of EO Inc., one of several alliances racing to define the holy grail of handhelds. Years later, Hauser would act as a spoiler in NVIDIA’s $40 billion effort to acquire ARM which by that time represented one of the last big collections of world-class microprocessor architects.
Rodger Woolnough, a veteran semiconductor editor and EE Times’ European correspondent, conducted the interview. He and Hauser understood the goal – deliver a technically sound yet dazzling vision suited to the times.
Hauser painted in broad strokes a future that included asynchronous processors (a novel idea for a chip still in the labs) and ARM’s own Active Badge, a sort of early forerunner of the Internet of Things, all tied together by future networks based on asynchronous transfer mode, a hot emerging comms tech of the day. The asynchronous world of Hermann Hauser.
It sounded almost poetic, but none of it happened. In fact, the EO alliance Hauser led was among the first of the great mobile efforts to fold. Its tablet-sized device was the subject of gallons of ink from the trade press, but it was heavy, expensive and lacked useful software.
Next: An Omen, an Aide-de-Camp and a Gatekeeper
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