Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age
by Leslie Berlin · 7 Nov 2017 · 615pp · 168,775 words
was Ron Diehl, a technician Alvarez had worked with and who had recently left Sylvania. He wanted Alvarez to join him at his new employer, ROLM. He told her that four Sylvania engineers (Eugene Richeson, Ken Oshman, Walter Loewenstern, and Bob Maxfield) had started the company the month before, naming
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and into front offices. DEC, based near Boston, was the largest minicomputer manufacturer, trailed by its nearby competitor, Data General, which made the computer that ROLM was ruggedizing for military use.34 Hewlett-Packard was third in the market but gaining.II Kurtzig was amazed and thrilled that Hewlett-Packard would
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regulatory decision had forced AT&T to allow telephones and other equipment made by outside companies to be connected to the AT&T network.III ROLM’s CBX system, which had a minicomputer at its core, was cheaper and more flexible than the legacy AT&T systems with electromechanical phone
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switches. The ROLM CBX could also do things that once had been the task of operators: restrict certain extensions to local numbers only; identify the duration and dialed
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mascara could contaminate the chips—and worked covered from head to toe in mandatory hats, goggles, long sleeves, pants, and gloves. The dress code at ROLM, on the other hand, consisted of little more than “you must wear closed-toe shoes,” Alvarez says. She and the other workers also had more
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growth. Aside from stock options, which were reserved for those cofounder Bob Maxfield calls “our most creative and top people,” every benefit or perk at ROLM was available to every employee in the company.10 Everyone could participate in generous medical and dental plans, as well as profit sharing and reduced
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-rate stock purchase plans. ROLM reimbursed tuition for employees attending school while working. Every permanent employee—even those on the assembly line—was entitled to a twelve-week sabbatical with
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way to keep out unions was to offer production workers benefits and compensation comparable to what they would receive with union representation. Many companies, including ROLM, did precisely that.16 After a few months on the assembly line, Alvarez decided that the work could be done better. “I had worked
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was one more reason why the engineers paid attention when Alvarez offered a suggestion or questioned one of their directives. She was often right, and ROLM was growing so quickly that employees adopted good ideas wherever they came from. “You didn’t have this corporate bureaucracy to help you do your
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suggestions for reconfiguring the line was implemented. Soon thereafter, she was promoted to line leader. In September 1976, around the same time Alvarez was promoted, ROLM went public. (Larry Sonsini, the young attorney with a vision for a law firm that could serve as a one-stop shop for entrepreneurs, drew
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up the registration statement.) Although ROLM would become a Fortune 500 company and create many millionaires among its stockholders, its IPO was a disappointment. The initial offering price of $14 per
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to supervisor suited her. She was learning. She felt that her opinion was respected and she had influence. She was paid fairly. Every few Fridays, ROLM held a companywide beer bash, and she was at ease chatting with managers and executives. “Everyone mixed with everyone,” she later said. Alvarez was also
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Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, designed the headquarters building. A precursor of the elaborate amenity-filled campuses popular in Silicon Valley today, the ROLM site, now a parking lot for the San Francisco 49ers’ Levi’s Stadium, also housed a cafeteria with heavily subsidized lunches, which meant the battles
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over the microwave would disappear. Alvarez loved ROLM, but she also felt that over the long term, manufacturing, in its repetitiveness and demand for perfect consistency, would always be a “soul-sucking job
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used the motto “One system, one company,” had not only owned the phone lines but also built and rented every phone connected to the system. ROLM cofounder Bob Maxfield likened the old way to being required to rent lamps and lightbulbs from the electric utility company. This Is a Big Fucking
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consultant, thirty-two-year-old John Hall. A finance expert who had worked at an education startup and helped to draft the financial section of ROLM’s business plan, Hall now served as international group controller for Syntex, a Palo Alto–based pharmaceutical company best-known for its pioneering birth control
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ALVAREZ Around the same time that Mike Markkula began planning for Apple’s IPO, Fawn Alvarez was promoted to the job of manufacturing supervisor at ROLM, the pioneering telecommunications and military computer company. Her new position was still considered a production job, but it entitled her to a private cubicle
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near the manufacturing line for ROLM’s CBX telecommunications system. Alvarez loved having her own space, even if she did not have her own phone line like the engineers she worked
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explain the necessary steps. She found the experience, which happened at least a few times each week, very frustrating. Looking back, Jeff Smith, a former ROLM production engineer, understands why. After forty years and many senior management jobs, Smith sees that back then, engineers wrote change orders “without regard for what
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wanted to move out of manufacturing and join the engineers in the production engineering group. Rea, a fellow risk taker unafraid of upending convention—“At ROLM, the meek didn’t inherit the stock options,” Jeff Smith explains—was willing to try it. Rea pointed Alvarez to an office. She noted
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and engineers with generous stock option packages. Moreover, the benefits filtered throughout the company. In January 1980, Alvarez’s mother, Vineta, who had been buying ROLM stock at the discounted rate for years—and who had been granted options on 2,000 shares—retired. She had not been allowed to buy
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paid less simply because they were women. Now determined to jump into sales or marketing in as few steps as possible, Alvarez mapped out how ROLM was organized. Only one group interacted with production engineering, where she worked, and also with marketing and sales. A forecasting group translated sales and
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married with children to support, Alvarez was furious. “Why should that matter?” she asked. “What matters is the work!” She got her raise. By 1981, ROLM had added more than 400,000 square feet to the flagship Silicon Valley campus and purchased seventy acres of land nearby. The company sold two
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categories of products: CBX phone systems for businesses and ruggedized computers for the military. Most of the new space housed administrative and engineering employees. ROLM had shifted many assembly jobs like those Alvarez and her mother had once held to Colorado Springs, Colorado. Land for factories was cheaper there, and
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could be as low as 13 cents per hour. Apple was building a plant in Cork, Ireland. Jobs outside of manufacturing were leaving, as well. ROLM moved a team focused on product development and product marketing to Austin, Texas. “We thought moving was pretty much an imperative,” explains cofounder Bob Maxfield
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1980. He worried about what he called “the consequent pressure on blue-collar workers, the poor, aged, and disadvantaged.”6 His concerns were prescient. * * * I. ROLM made CBX systems of various sizes. Alvarez was responsible for systems for up to four thousand phone extensions. The man she overheard forecast for systems
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at her table. She had added several marquee names, including the investment banker Tommy Unterberg, Tymshare executive Ron Braniff, and Ken Oshman, the CEO of ROLM. Kurtzig had planned the dinner to celebrate what she anticipated would be a unanimous vote to take ASK public eight months later, in March 1981
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trappings of a classic Silicon Valley company. Its improvisational work culture featured jokes, first names, and dispersed authority. ASK’s board included the CEO of ROLM, one of the Valley’s most successful firms; the managing senior partner of a major investment bank; and an attorney from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
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the cooperation of people from finance and product management, as well as sales, marketing, and manufacturing. He relied on Alvarez, with her long history at ROLM and contacts in multiple divisions, to help identify and interest the people with leverage or influence throughout the company.1 Ring had graduated from Harvard
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you the day Kennedy died?’ ”5 For weeks, Alvarez had heard rumors that “something big” was going to happen, but the acquisition nonetheless shocked her. ROLM had recently joined the Fortune 500. The company had $37 million in profits on nearly $660 million in sales.6 “No one thought the founders
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would sell,” Alvarez recalls. She had not known that although ROLM’s sales had continued to climb, its profit margins were shrinking. The founders, somewhat to their own surprise, had decided that a sale was inevitable
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, and the sooner the better for ROLM shareholders. On paper, ROLM and IBM seemed a fine match. Nearly all of the top one hundred companies on the Fortune index owned computers (either large machines or
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the year-old IBM PC) from IBM and phone systems from ROLM, which had 15 percent of the switchboard market, second only to AT&T.7 For years, analysts and forecasters had debated whether computer systems or
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telephone systems—data or voice—would be at the heart of the “office of the future.”I A ROLM-IBM pairing would obviate that question with systems that seamlessly integrated data and voice. On news of the acquisition, both companies’ stock prices rose. “
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All over ROLM there was euphoria, followed by ‘Oh, my God. What next?’ ” recalls Ron Raffensperger.8 The euphoria came from the financial bonanza the acquisition represented for
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success with its personal computer—developed in secret by what was essentially an internal startup operation—offered some hope that the giant company would appreciate ROLM’s innovative and entrepreneurial spirit. A visit by three top IBM executives, who dressed down and hoisted beers at one of the Friday bashes,
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a position that traditionally had much influence—but that had never stopped her before. * * * I. The voice-data distinction is a bit oversimplified, since the ROLM CBX stored voice messages as data. II. AT&T Information Systems was founded in 1984. Bell Labs, which had developed the UNIX operating system and
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capacities until 1997, after which she became a marketing consultant, finally enjoying a long tenure in a role she had wanted ever since seeing the ROLM employee who had worn lovely suits and fancy hats. In 2005, Alvarez married and changed her name to Fawn Alvarez Talbott. Ten years later,
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company, ACM Research, to investigate distributed intelligence control systems.I Today the publicly held company is called Echelon. Its first CEO was Ken Oshman, the ROLM cofounder who told Sandy Kurtzig that ASK was not ready for an IPO in 1980. Early board members included Larry Sonsini, as well as former
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Throughout the 1980s and well beyond, he continued to work with some of the most important companies in Silicon Valley, including Apple, Intel, Tandem, and ROLM. He also played an integral role in helping the Semiconductor Industry Association make its successful case in Congress for the importance of high-technology industries
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game from Atari. The company was called Syzygy at the time. Courtesy: Fawn Alvarez Talbott Fawn Alvarez on her first day of work on the ROLM assembly line, Halloween 1975. Courtesy: Kurt Taylor. Bob Taylor in Palo Alto, enjoying his beloved 1967 Corvette Stingray. Courtesy: Benj Edwards Atari founders Ted
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. Most of these people had worked in the semiconductor industry before coming to Apple. Courtesy: Fawn Alvarez Talbott Fawn Alvarez began a rapid rise at ROLM after only a few months on the assembly line. By 1982, when this picture was taken in Amsterdam, she was traveling the world. Courtesy:
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Eubank, interview by author, Feb. 14, 2017. 4. Fawn Alvarez Talbott, interview by author, July 24, 2013. 5. Katherine Maxfield, Starting Up Silicon Valley: How ROLM Became a Cultural Icon and Fortune 500 Company (Austin, TX: Emerald Book Company, 2014): 28. The Fairchildren — Mike Markkula 1. Mike Markkula, CHM interview. 2
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Sally Hines, in 40 Years of Discovery, Office of Technology Licensing anniversary publication. Genentech held Friday-afternoon celebrations that they called Ho-hos. Tandem and ROLM were also renowned for their Friday-afternoon beer bashes. That Flips My Switch — Mike Markkula 1. Mike Rose to “Bob,” June 23, 1976, Apple
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Up (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991): 158. 4. Burt McMurtry, interview by author, Nov. 26, 2012; McMurtry, CHM interview. McMurtry credits investments in ROLM, NBI, Triad Systems, and KLA for his venture fund’s success. 5. The company was informally called by its original name, Cullinet. John Cullinane, CBI
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the acquisition. 9. Ann Magney Kieffaber, interview by author, Feb. 15, 2017. 10. Vineta Alvarez Eubank, interview by author, Feb. 14, 2017. 11. “IBM and ROLM Cope with Prenuptial Jitters,” BusinessWeek, Nov. 19, 1984. 12. Fawn Alvarez Talbott, interview by author, June 9, 2015. 13. Talbott, interview by author, July 24
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. What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. Maxfield, Katherine. Starting Up Silicon Valley: How ROLM Became a Cultural Icon and Fortune 500 Company. Austin, TX: Emerald Book Company, 2014. McElheny, Victor K. “Animal Gene Shifted to Bacteria; Aid Seen to
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’s recruitment of, 44–45 education and training of, 42 experience and skills of, 44 at Fairchild Semiconductor, 42, 45 at Lockheed, 42, 45 at ROLM, 41, 44–45, 159 at Sylvania, 42–44 Alvarez family, 41–42, 46, 159, 167, 370 Amazin’ Software, see Electronic Arts American Cancer Society,
The Big Score
by Michael S. Malone · 20 Jul 2021
. Even now, Hogan is scoring impressive victories. By being an early and prescient investor in one of the most exciting electronic firms of the 1980s—Rolm (digital PBXs)—Hogan has continued to extend his influence as well as make many millions of dollars. Hogan’s initial investment of $36,000 in
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Rolm has turned into $3 million—more money than he ever made at Fairchild. (He had failures, too, notably an investment in the ill-starred Osborne
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discounts… The vitality of all this is breathtaking. Talented scientists and businesspeople hopping back and forth between companies, one day at a big corporation like Rolm, the next in some closet-size concrete tilt-up with the company name, decided upon that morning, written on a sheet of paper and taped
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period that many of the firms for which Silicon Valley is now known got their start, either being founded or coming together as serious firms: Rolm (entering the telephone market), Apple, Amdahl (introducing its first product), Atari, Commodore (as a computer company), and Tandem. It was these firms that would lead
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mainframe computer. Just as difficult to accept was the thought of investing a venture bankroll of $50 million (compared with, for example, $2 million for Rolm) on an unproved firm that did not expect to ship its first product for half a decade. So, hat in hand, Amdahl tried every corner
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in Silicon Valley are those which have either spun off from (Tandem, Apple) or modeled themselves after (Rolm) Hewlett-Packard Co. Rolm Corp. (for years the company tried to convince the press to print it ROLM, as in AT&T) was founded in 1969 by four alumni of Rice University: Gene Richeson, Ken
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dust—the kind of computer that could be taken ashore on a landing craft and then carried into battle aboard a jeep or tank. Obviously Rolm’s idea was a good one, because the computer shortly became the standard for the German, South Korean, and Taiwanese navies, as well as the
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of ex-college kids, trying to bust into an untested market populated at the time by only a few giants like IBM. In the end, Rolm was founded in June 1969 with just $75,000—and, in a nearly mythical beginning for a Santa Clara County firm
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, Rolm’s first building was an abandoned prune-drying shed. Oshman assumed the presidency. The founders worked feverishly, and by November the company had more than
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a dozen employees and its first working prototype. At $20,000 the new Rolm “mil-spec” computer was less than half the price of its nearest competitor. Still, it took several years for the company to break into the
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club of military contractors. By 1974, Rolm had reached $6 million in annual sales. Like most firms, it could have stuck with the product line it knew and enjoyed a nice, comfortable
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to a larger defense contractor. Instead, in a breathtaking move, the company completely changed direction. Like Amdahl, Rolm decided to take on a giant, in this case AT&T. And, just like Amdahl, Rolm decided to hit its opponent in its weak spot, at the “central processors” of its system, its switchboards
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down costs. This strategy not only worked, it turned into one of the success stories of the electronics industry. In its first year selling PBXs, Rolm made $6 million from those products, but by 1983 these products and their descendants made up more than 90 percent of the company’s sales
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they could be found at nearly every one of the nation’s top 100 companies. In mid-1983, Rolm had installed more than 11,000 of these systems. Not surprisingly, in these years Rolm was the fastest growing public corporation in Silicon Valley. But for that kind of growth, having good products
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done as good a job managing the company as they have in designing and building their products.” Stanford business professor Steven C. Wheelwright would add, “Rolm has always been more systematic [than other companies]. Time and again, [it] has managed to anticipate the problems that come with growth.” One important reason
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so successful was that it treated its people well. As Oshman wrote: “The humanity and challenge of the Rolm work environment is predicated on a dual responsibility. Rolm Corporation acts to provide equal opportunity to grow and be promoted; fair treatment for each individual; respect for personal privacy; encouragement to succeed; opportunity
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for creativity; evaluation based on job performance in the context of the Rolm philosophy.” This is pretty gutsy stuff, particularly the part about respect for personal privacy. And Oshman wasn’t all talk. The facility
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Rolm built for itself in Santa Clara became, thanks to wire service photographs, famous throughout the world. And with good reason. Some grimy steelworker sauntering out
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gymnasium. These weren’t executives either, but workers just like him who happened to be lucky enough to work for a company out West called Rolm. The Rolm gymnasium was easily the most conspicuous part of Rolm’s employee-support program. But in many ways it was the least important. The key to
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in its daily treatment of the employees—not in the big grandstand play but in the tiny details. One need only walk around Rolm to see that philosophy was in practice. The gym, an employee cafeteria that was more of a restaurant, the carefully tended office and manufacturing areas,
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the friendliness of the employees matched by an equal reserve that indicated that Rolm people felt as though they were part of a team, and, most of all, an intense loyalty. These were the things that made
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shining example of how a company can be both successful and oriented toward its employees. In the early eighties, Rolm again began to change course, building on its existing expertise in telecommunications to jump into the office automation business. It was a clever strategy. The
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of maturity. The new, unbridled AT&T is not going to play with kid gloves anymore. Rolm got a taste of that in the first quarter of 1984, when a phone company employees strike kept Rolm’s systems from going online for three weeks—resulting in only a 7 percent increase in
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sales over the year before and a 64 percent drop in net income. Even perfect Rolm, it seemed, could be hurt by a changing market. Still, there was ample evidence that the rest of the world saw
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Rolm’s downturn as only a temporary setback in a long, ever climbing path. After all, in less than 15 years the company had grown from $
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shed to more than $500 million in sales and more than 7,000 employees scattered around the world. The stock market showed its faith in Rolm by giving its stock, even during the downturn, an extraordinary 43–1 price-earnings ratio—which gave
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true value came in mid-1983, when IBM agreed to purchase nearly 4 million new shares of Rolm stock for about $230 million. IBM had done this once before, a few months earlier, with Intel—and it was considered an indication that America’
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IBM had in mind was a matter of considerable speculation—but by the end of the year, two IBM executives had been nominated to the Rolm board of directors. That, it turned out, was only IBM’s opening gambit. With AT&T newly trimmed and unleashed on the open market, Big
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Blue wanted more than just friendly telecommunications equipment. It wanted Rolm, lock, stock, and volleyball net. So, in mid-1984, Rolm stopped being a Silicon Valley firm and became merely another brick in the monolith of IBM. In retrospect, if one
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complaint could have been leveled at Rolm it was that it was rather dull. A good place to play basketball, maybe, but a little too straight. The only quirkiness in the company
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-1970s and rainbow-colored “Bless Man” and “We are One” bumpers were sported all over the Valley. Now that was kinky, but once Richeson left, Rolm went back to button-down sobriety. Oshman just wasn’t a hoot-and-holler type, and the company was so damn organized it seemed to
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grow like a monopoly. Between 1974 and 1982, the company just about doubled its sales every year, breaking $300 million in 1982. Again, as with Rolm, it took an extraordinary corporate environment to maintain that kind of explosive growth that would have blown most companies apart. As with
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Rolm, the key for Tandem was a modified HP Way. Tandem became famous for its swimming pool and its Friday afternoon beer busts. Other HP programs
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Tandem adopted included flexible hours, pushing responsibility down through the ranks, promoting from within. Tandem also took ideas from elsewhere: It shared with Rolm the Intel concept of a sabbatical after several years of service. But Tandem carried the process one step further—one step too far, according to
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Friday, and on Saturday I rented office space and started working on a business plan.” It was Burton McMurtry, the man who brought together the Rolm team and by then a venture capitalist, who lent Stevens and two partners $250,000 to get the company started. And even McMurtry didn’t
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stroke. So much for corporate conscience. A few miles away, where Ken Oshman, positively a cultural Neanderthal compared to Jobs, had been building equally successful Rolm, there had never been a layoff—despite a complete shift in product strategy. And mind you, Apple’s layoff was during a boom, not in
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line, then overnight jump into another whole new market. Instrument companies could become computer companies, like HP, and computer companies could become telephone companies, like Rolm, and chip companies could become computer companies, like National Semiconductor. The textbooks said to build up by internally generated profits? The Silicon Valley companies found
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the workforce is treated. If it is protected and talked with and feels part of the organization, as it does, say, at Intel, HP, or Rolm, then no problem. But if the workforce is mistreated, disrupted, and, worst of all, feels forgotten by management, then the future of Silicon Valley be
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-Series computers, 299–300 Intel and, 187 Japanscam scandal and, 188 Memorex and, 302 plug-compatibles and, 298–99 pricing strategy of, 294–95, 346 Rolm and, 314 700 Series computers, 342 STRETCH (Model 7030) computer, 343 360 Series computers, 248, 293–95, 343–46 370 Series computers, 248, 293, 294
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, Sheldon, 92, 114, 119 Roberts, Thomas, 153, 181 Roberts, William, 90 Rock, Arthur, 95, 165, 211, 318, 325, 403 Rockefeller, Shroeder, 211 Rojas, Marta, 443 Rolm Corp., 142, 289, 291, 295, 310–16, 324, 406, 450 ROM (read only memory), 238 Rosen, Ben, 170 Ross, Lorraine, 444 Ross, Steve, 383 Ryan
The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara · 8 Jul 2019
his business partner was wasting his time. The market was bleak, but there were signs that it would rebound. One of the brightest signs was ROLM, a company that his old partner Jack Melchor had seeded and nurtured since its founding in 1969. McMurtry was closer to
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ROLM than to any other company in his portfolio. The connection was personal—the firm’s four young founders were members of the Rice Mafia, three
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of whom had worked under McMurtry in his final months before becoming a VC. The fourth was someone he’d tried to recruit. ROLM stood out among its peers for the diversity of its product line: its early marquee products included a “rugged” field-ready minicomputer for the military
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1976—and proceeded to sell under its offering price for fifteen months. But right as Reid Dennis was gathering folks around his dining room table, ROLM’s stock price started to bob up from under the water. “The market was beginning to arise,” McMurtry remembered. “The early birds were coming out
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.” In the case of Burt McMurtry, patience paid off. Ultimately, he and his partners reaped a fortyfold return on their ROLM investment, making him a fortune, and a reputation as one of the sagest VCs in town.24 Even though these promising signs meant that some
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of labor organizers and forming a union. Freshly paved jogging paths encircled Intel’s San Jose campus. HP offered free coffee and donuts every morning. ROLM proudly branded itself “A Great Place to Work.” Across the Valley, volleyball courts filled in the afternoon with young employees taking breaks from long days
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of the two “early birds” giving Valley VCs hope that the Seventies slump would one day be over. (The second was the Burt McMurtry–backed ROLM.) By the early 1980s, Tandem had become one of the fastest-growing companies in America. The way it grew drew nearly as much attention as
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December 1982 IBM bought a 12 percent stake in Intel, whose 8088 chips powered the PC. Six months later, it bought up 15 percent of ROLM, signaling its ambitions to make the IBM desktop a node in a fully wired “electronic office” of the future. The Valley soared higher than ever
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’s economic output still came from aerospace and defense. The defense buildup that these technologists opposed so passionately was, quite literally, happening in their backyards. ROLM, the company that had made Burt McMurtry’s venture career, earned 99 percent of its $10 million revenue in 1975 from “mil spec” sales of
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Fall of the Bell System: A Study in Prices and Politics (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Katherine Maxfield, Starting Up Silicon Valley: How ROLM became a Cultural Icon and Fortune 500 Company (Austin, Tex.: Emerald Book Co., 2014). The precedent at work in the Carterfone decision was the 1956
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$250 Million in Intel,” InfoWorld 5, no. 5 (January 31, 1983): 30; Jean S. Bozman, “The IBM-Rolm Connection,” Information Week 37 (October 21, 1985): 16; Katherine Maxfield, Starting Up Silicon Valley: How ROLM became a Cultural Icon and Fortune 500 Company (Austin, Tex.: Emerald Book Co., 2014). 28. Mitch Kapor, interview
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, 138, 144, 154 Rock, Arthur, 41–42, 76, 88, 181, 189, 241 Rockwell International, 196 Rodgers, T. J., 298, 319, 321, 336 Rolling Stone, 130 ROLM, 166–67, 201, 202, 239, 249 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 20, 22–23, 160, 163, 373 Rosen, Ben, 176–77, 179, 187–89, 197, 235, 240
Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace
by Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner · 15 Jan 1995
Amendment. There happened to be a particularly juicy phile posted on Fifth Amendment. It was a technical treatise on how to crack a Rolm-made PBX phone system. Rolm PBXs, as any hacker in 1990 could have told you, are valuable properties. They are favored by large corporations and government agencies, which
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into the system using the back door, and how, once inside, to monitor phone lines. Armed with such knowledge, virtually anyone anywhere could crack a Rolm PBX. The patrons of the Fifth Amendment board didn't want such information widely disseminated for one simple reason. If lamers got hold of it
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, they'd go into a PBX and screw something up. Rolm would get complaints from customers, and the whole system would be overhauled to close up the holes. So, while the phile was available for perusal
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phile, surreptitiously copying it right off its super-secure resting place on the BBS. It was a fine deception. Less than a week later, the Rolm Revelation was posted on bulletin boards all over the country. The Texans were incensed. Such highly specific, technical information could only have come from one
Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima
by James Mahaffey · 15 Feb 2015
bay. There was a list of new equipment mandated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission after the Three Mile Island disaster, and my contribution was four ROLM MSE/14 minicomputers and associated hardware, taking up four racks for each of the two reactors. These machines would work hard, 24 hours a day
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Multiplexer Communications Station, bolted to the back wall of the electronics bay. A fat, multi-conductor cable (no. 5769) ran between the Directrol and the ROLM 2150 I/O expansion box. Both the Directrol and the expansion box had been exercised continuously back at our shop in Atlanta for years without
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he visited often. By the time we discovered him, he had chewed up the insulating sheath on our very expensive cable no. 5769, connecting the ROLM I/O box to the Directrol. Why he so enjoyed the taste of plastic insulation on that particular cable, I could not comprehend. It had
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tape over the wound. It still worked perfectly, but we were too embarrassed to deliver it to the plant in that condition, so we called ROLM Military Computers in Cupertino, California, and ordered a new unit. They sent it promptly, and this was an improved example of the cable. The Army
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had apparently given them grief about the weight of their parallel-digital cables, so ROLM had built new ones using a smaller gauge of wires. It was slender and svelte, not as clumsy and bulky-looking as the original cable
The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley
by Leslie Berlin · 9 Jun 2005
might have some other ideas for OmniPage. This redirection is vintage Noyce. “Even if he was blasting you,” recalls Kenneth Oshman, CEO and founder of ROLM, the business communications and military computer systems firm on whose board Noyce served for two years, “you just felt good about it.” The people on
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talk was becoming “as common as a tall Lone Star beer on a hot day.” Within a few years, several prominent Silicon Valley companies—Intel, ROLM, Tandem Computers, Advanced Micro Devices, National Semiconductor—had sites in or near Austin. Motorola and Data General had facilities in the area, too, as did
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U.S. government, the U.S. semiconductor industry, and Sematech are damned lucky that you are a glutton for punishment,” wrote Ken Oshman, founder of ROLM. “With you at the helm, a possibility I never contemplated, all my objections [to SEMATECH] evaporate.” Gordon Moore summarized the feelings of many of Noyce
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, 113, 122–23; and Intel, 156–59, 164–68, 179, 188–89, 225 Rockefeller family, 54, 166, 192 Rod, Catherine, x Rogers, T. J., 290 ROLM, 276, 291 Rosenfield, Joseph, 166, 208–9 Rosenthal, Sam, 208 Sah, C. T., 95 Sanders, Jerry, 252, 255, 259, 288. See also Advanced Micro Devices
Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime
by Julian Guthrie · 15 Nov 2019
given rise to more new companies and industries than anywhere else in the world, including such technology giants as Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, Teledyne, ROLM, Amgen, Genentech, Advanced Micro Devices, Tandem, Atari, Oracle, Apple, Dell, Electronic Arts, Compaq, FedEx, Netscape, LSI, Yahoo!, Amazon, Cisco, PayPal, eBay, Google, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Tesla
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his company, Montgomery Securities, to NationsBank for $1.3 billion, the same investor who had helped take public several seminal companies, including Amgen, Micron Technology, ROLM, Integrated Device Technology, Yahoo!, and Siebel Systems. It was no surprise to anyone that he wanted his firm’s name on the left side of
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well-trodden path to the offices of attorney Larry Sonsini, who had helped incorporate, build, and take public just about every major tech company, from ROLM and Apple to Netscape, Pixar, and hundreds more. Brin and Page had visited Sonsini on a Saturday in 1998 to talk about incorporating Google and
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Venture Associates in 1974 with Burt McMurtry and Burgess Jamieson. The three raised $19 million. One of their first home runs was an investment in ROLM, an early entrant in the digital telephone business. Then McMurtry decided he wanted to start his own fund; Jamieson wanted to do his own thing
The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby · 1 Feb 2022 · 935pp · 197,338 words
Kramlich of New Enterprise Associates was sticking with his offer of $13 per share. Jack Melchor, known for backing a successful 1970s computer maker called ROLM, was also offering $13. Mayfield had upped its number from $7, but refused to go higher than that apparently magical $13 level. Metcalfe suspected collusion
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, 71 Rockefeller, Laurance, 26 Rockefeller family, 26, 32, 35, 51, 56, 71 Rockefeller University, 68 Rodgers, T. J., 434n, 437n Rodriguez, Sixto, 375–76, 379 ROLM Corporation, 103 Romer, Paul, 447n Roosevelt, Franklin, 18 Ross, Steve, 66 RPX Corporation, 269–70 S Sacks, David, 444n Salesforce, 191, 302 Salganik, Matthew, 376
Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM
by Paul Carroll · 19 Sep 1994
10 percent of Microsoft. Lowe initially seem ed inter ested. T here was even a precedent, because IBM had bought similar stakes in Intel and Rolm. But following the initial Gates-Lowe conversa tion, Lowe came back and said h e’d pass. The sting of the U.S. antitrust suit
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, 285, 286 Remington Rand, 4, 52 Rizzo, Paul, 66, 339 RJR Nabisco, 349, 350, 352, 354 Roach, John, 149 Robinson, Jim, 354 Rogers, Jack, 2 Rolm Company, 119 Rosen, Ben, 145, 147—48 Rusnack, Greg, 328 Russell, Bill, 328 Sabol, John, 112, 113, 165, 183 Sams, Jack, 8-9 , 17-18