标签: acquisition

You would have it half right if you assume it is easy (fun?) to run a company for 40 years. The other half is akin to skating on thin ice almost every day. In fact, who would want to do such a thing? Just keeping a job that long is remarkable. Some things just happen. After college, I had two rather substantial positions, but I didn't last in either one. Essentially, I got fired from both. So how does one have that record and then keep a long-term job for many years? The short answer is that, in the other jobs, I thought my ideas for products were better than those the company was pursuing. I wasn't the boss, so I went packing. You know the old story about companies like HP getting started in a garage? We didn't do that at Data Translation. We started in my basement in New England (where nearly every house has a basement). But we didn't stay there long—maybe three weeks. We found an old office building about four miles away in downtown Framingham, Mass., and we (all three of us) grabbed it.     An early Data Translation product, the DT2762 data acquisition card for the QBus. Its acquisition hardware is built from discrete components housed in a module on the board. Even though this was an office building—housing insurance agents and paper pushers of some kind—it had some unique character. On the third floor (the top floor) was an old bowling alley with six or eight lanes. On the ground floor was a restaurant. I never ate there, because it was grungy. We did everything in our office, which was one small room. We designed and assembled circuit boards, met the UPS truck each day with deliveries, and on and on. Of course, we started on a shoestring—no salaries. Each of us mortgaged a house to get $10K from a bank. That was our capital. We surmounted some large hurdles, including legal ones. (A former employer said we stole trade secrets, but it never said what they were.) One of the three founders left; he was concerned about the legal matter, but really he didn't think a one-room company was going anywhere. But we just kept digging. We'd sell some modules, run some ads with the money, and then sell some more. Sales kept growing enough for us to get a more realistic office, hire two more people, and finally shake the legal morass, and away we went. After several years, we took the company public. We were listed on Nasdaq and were ready to begin a new phase of growth. Of course, there were some very notable occurrences. Let me mention a couple. First large order Orders for the first two years of our endeavor went along haltingly, with ups and downs, until we attracted a possible order from Western Electric. The company was building a Navy ship-based system that could use one of our modules in each system. Western Electric wanted to visit us. Imagine a large company sending an inspector to see four people in two rooms of an old office building. Our visitor was Bob Servilio, who was taken aback by our size but quickly warmed to us. He saw that we were determined, technically smart, and capable. What we didn't know then was that, as a large company, Western Electric needed and benefited from buying from a small company. So the first check (cheque for banks) for $75,000 as a pre-payment for this order was a big win. Visit by big French distributor We received a note that our newly appointed French distributor would be visiting in a week. Two top executives were making a US tour of suppliers. These executives had no idea our company was just four folks in a two-room office. Our reaction was to set up more soldering stations and ask two friends to come in as production employees. This boosted our employee count by 50%. They came in dressed in beautiful business suits, which was in sharp contrast with the jeans and T-shirts that reflected our small, hands-on approach. Somehow, the distributor stuck with us and kept buying and selling our products. We were honest and straightforward. It worked. Many other surprises followed, but suffice it say that there was never a dull moment. I think a Cheers -type situation comedy would be needed to give it justice. The one good thing going for any new business is the goodwill of customers, suppliers, and press folks, but not bankers, lawyers, and large companies. Fred Molinari President CEO Data Translation

You may think it is easy (fun?) to run a company for 40 years. You have it half right. The other half is akin to skating on thin ice almost every day. In fact, who would want to do such a thing? Just keeping a job that long is remarkable. Some things just happen. After college, I had two rather substantial positions, but I didn't last in either one. Essentially, I got fired from both. So how does one have that record and then keep a long-term job for many years? The short answer is that, in the other jobs, I thought my ideas for products were better than those the company was pursuing. I wasn't the boss, so I went packing. You know the old story about companies like HP getting started in a garage? We didn't do that at Data Translation. We started in my basement in New England (where nearly every house has a basement). But we didn't stay there long—maybe three weeks. We found an old office building about four miles away in downtown Framingham, Mass., and we (all three of us) grabbed it.     An early Data Translation product, the DT2762 data acquisition card for the QBus. Its acquisition hardware is built from discrete components housed in a module on the board. Even though this was an office building—housing insurance agents and paper pushers of some kind—it had some unique character. On the third floor (the top floor) was an old bowling alley with six or eight lanes. On the ground floor was a restaurant. I never ate there, because it was grungy. We did everything in our office, which was one small room. We designed and assembled circuit boards, met the UPS truck each day with deliveries, and on and on. Of course, we started on a shoestring—no salaries. Each of us mortgaged a house to get $10K from a bank. That was our capital. We surmounted some large hurdles, including legal ones. (A former employer said we stole trade secrets, but it never said what they were.) One of the three founders left; he was concerned about the legal matter, but really he didn't think a one-room company was going anywhere. But we just kept digging. We'd sell some modules, run some ads with the money, and then sell some more. Sales kept growing enough for us to get a more realistic office, hire two more people, and finally shake the legal morass, and away we went. After several years, we took the company public. We were listed on Nasdaq and were ready to begin a new phase of growth. Of course, there were some very notable occurrences. Let me mention a couple. First large order Orders for the first two years of our endeavor went along haltingly, with ups and downs, until we attracted a possible order from Western Electric. The company was building a Navy ship-based system that could use one of our modules in each system. Western Electric wanted to visit us. Imagine a large company sending an inspector to see four people in two rooms of an old office building. Our visitor was Bob Servilio, who was taken aback by our size but quickly warmed to us. He saw that we were determined, technically smart, and capable. What we didn't know then was that, as a large company, Western Electric needed and benefited from buying from a small company. So the first check (cheque for banks) for $75,000 as a pre-payment for this order was a big win. Visit by big French distributor We received a note that our newly appointed French distributor would be visiting in a week. Two top executives were making a US tour of suppliers. These executives had no idea our company was just four folks in a two-room office. Our reaction was to set up more soldering stations and ask two friends to come in as production employees. This boosted our employee count by 50%. They came in dressed in beautiful business suits, which was in sharp contrast with the jeans and T-shirts that reflected our small, hands-on approach. Somehow, the distributor stuck with us and kept buying and selling our products. We were honest and straightforward. It worked. Many other surprises followed, but suffice it say that there was never a dull moment. I think a Cheers -type situation comedy would be needed to give it justice. The one good thing going for any new business is the goodwill of customers, suppliers, and press folks, but not bankers, lawyers, and large companies. Fred Molinari President CEO Data Translation  

National Semiconductor Corp. has just been acquired by competitor Texas Instruments for $6.5 billion. National was one of the three or four founding Silicon Valley semiconductor manufacturing corporations at the beginning of the modern electronics industry in the 1960s and 70s.   That one caught me by surprise! Shouldn't have, I guess. The signsand rumorswere there for all to see (as pointed out in a prescient story by Mark LaPedus of EETimes in January of 2010), for anyone willing to see it.   A lot of my formative years in the industry were spent writing about, or for, National Semiconductor and its competitors, first as a Silicon Valley Bureau Chief and Editor for the now defunct Electronics Magazine and then as an editorial and writing consultant to high tech firms. National was one of my clients for a number of years during the era of its president Charles E. (Charlie) Sporck, who became president and CEO in 1967. He transformed a second or third tier discrete electronics company, founded in the late 1950s in Connecticut, and transformed it into a California-based IC power house. Now known primarily for its analog and power IC expertise, between 1975 and 1985 National was into virtually every segment of the electronics business.   When I worked with the company as a contractor I was only one of several writer/editors filling similar roles, and the projects I was involved in were only a small portion of market and product segments in which the company was involved. But even that small microcosm of my direct experience still impresses me with its ambition and scope.   Initially I was involved in such product efforts as the COPS family of 8 bit MCUs (including a dual core, or dual ALU version); many of National's analog products; a number of second source microprocessor variants of both the Zilog Z80 and Intel 8080, including one implementation that could be programmed in BASIC. There was also the whole range of original microprocessor designs: NS8000, NS16000, NS32000, and several bit-slice digital signal processor implementations. There were also forays into various segments of the memory business: DRAMS, SRAMS, EEPROMs and even magnetic bubble memory.   Later on there were projects involving system-level hardware and software design as National moved into the OEM segment of the market as a builder of calculators and digital watches up against Intel, HP and various Japanese firms; minicomputers against the likes of Digital Equipment Corp.; bit-slice based mainframes in competition with Amdahl Corp. and IBM; and even point-of-sale digital terminals, against National Cash Register. (I still have a LCD-based scientific calculator/watch from National and an LED-based Novus digital watch from Intel.)   If there was a segment of the market in which there was a dollar to be made National Semiconductor was there, aggressively. But within this shell of grimly serious focus on business there was a sense of fun despite the fact that the competition in the marketplace was intense and cut-throat.   I remember a period when the company papered the industry with a series of tongue-in-cheek brochures, magazine ads and posters, some of which I was involved in developing. The posters, which are probably collector's items now, were festooned with cartoon caricatures of company executives, design team leaders, and engineers portrayed in colorful scenes based on some of the great historical battlefield conflicts.   In one, Sporck, his executives and engineering managers are shown rushing up San Juan Hill in Cuba to attack the 'enemy', portrayed as a National Semi competitor and its executives (from Texas Instruments, I seem to remember). In another, Charlie and his team are represented at the Custer's Battle of the Little Big Horn up against either Intel or Motorola, or both. Whether he and his executives were in the middle, fighting the Indians, or whether they were the Indians, battling their way in through the defenses, I don't remember.   The spirit of "Hey, let's have some fun" initiated by National infected their competitors. I was involved in some of these projects and for a while I became the go-to guy for fun collateral documentation (brochures, promotional material, etc.) by companies who wanted to get into the spirit of things.   One project for which I contracted was with Intel Corp. founder Bob Noyce, Executive VP Andy Grove, and several of their executives. They wanted a brochure for the company's sales conference. The brochure I wrote had a Star Trek theme, with Noyce, Grove and Intel engineers represented as crew members of the United Federation of Planets Starship Enterprise. Intel's competitors TI, National, Toshiba, Motorola, NEC and otherswere all represented as various alien star empires battling for domination of this particular segment of the Milky Way galaxy. I think National Semiconductor was portrayed as either the Romulan or Klingon Empires.   I remember those years as a time of excitement, intensity, and constant challenge, most of it in earnest. But most of all, it is the high-spirited fun that I remember and miss, because at the corporate level, it seems to be gone from today's high tech industry culture, although at the individual and work group level the humor and fun are still there, as many of the tales told in posts to EELife attest.   Psychologists tell us that a sense of humor is essential to sanity, so the disappearance of playfulness at higher levels in corporations, the loss of willingness to not take themselves too seriously, is troubling. Sure, the U.S. has two wars going on and is on the brink of a third. We're dealing with terrorists and revolutions and a potential oil crisis. And we are just now coming out of serious recession.   But things weren't much different then. Throughout the period I am talking about we had various serious issues facing the nation: The Vietnam conflict. Violent demonstrations. Race riots. At least two serious recessions. Inflation. And the U.S. was on the edge of losing its edge in semiconductor ICs to the Japanese.   In spite of these troubling conditions corporations felt secure enough to risk being goofy once in a while. Now, they do not seem to have any humor left in their obsessive search for profitability.   In terms of maturity, those were the days of the industry's adolescence. So maybe it is a matter of age. Now the industry is in middle age and upper management seems to have lost its spirit for such sanity-preserving pranks.        

National Semiconductor Corp. has just been acquired by competitor Texas Instruments for Rs.29,562.59 crore ($6.5 billion). National was one of the three or four founding Silicon Valley semiconductor manufacturing corporations at the beginning of the modern electronics industry in the 1960s and 70s.   That one caught me by surprise! Shouldn't have, I guess. The signs—and rumours—were there for all to see (as pointed out in a prescient story by Mark LaPedus of EETimes in January of 2010), for anyone willing to see it.   A lot of my formative years in the industry were spent writing about, or for, National Semiconductor and its competitors, first as a Silicon Valley Bureau Chief and Editor for the now defunct Electronics Magazine and then as an editorial and writing consultant to high tech firms. National was one of my clients for a number of years during the era of its president Charles E. (Charlie) Sporck, who became president and CEO in 1967. He transformed a second or third tier discrete electronics company, founded in the late 1950s in Connecticut, and transformed it into a California-based IC power house. Now known primarily for its analogue and power IC expertise, between 1975 and 1985 National was into virtually every segment of the electronics business.   When I worked with the company as a contractor I was only one of several writer/editors filling similar roles, and the projects I was involved in were only a small portion of market and product segments in which the company was involved. But even that small microcosm of my direct experience still impresses me with its ambition and scope.   Initially I was involved in such product efforts as the COPS family of 8 bit MCUs (including a dual core, or dual ALU version); many of National's analogue products; a number of second source microprocessor variants of both the Zilog Z80 and Intel 8080, including one implementation that could be programmed in BASIC. There was also the whole range of original microprocessor designs: NS8000, NS16000, NS32000, and several bit-slice digital signal processor implementations. There were also forays into various segments of the memory business: DRAMS, SRAMS, EEPROMs and even magnetic bubble memory.   Later on there were projects involving system-level hardware and software design as National moved into the OEM segment of the market as a builder of calculators and digital watches up against Intel, HP and various Japanese firms; minicomputers against the likes of Digital Equipment Corp.; bit-slice based mainframes in competition with Amdahl Corp. and IBM; and even point-of-sale digital terminals, against National Cash Register. (I still have a LCD-based scientific calculator/watch from National and an LED-based Novus digital watch from Intel.)   If there was a segment of the market in which there was a dollar to be made National Semiconductor was there, aggressively. But within this shell of grimly serious focus on business there was a sense of fun despite the fact that the competition in the marketplace was intense and cut-throat.   I remember a period when the company papered the industry with a series of tongue-in-cheek brochures, magazine ads and posters, some of which I was involved in developing. The posters, which are probably collector's items now, were festooned with cartoon caricatures of company executives, design team leaders, and engineers portrayed in colourful scenes based on some of the great historical battlefield conflicts.   In one, Sporck, his executives and engineering managers are shown rushing up San Juan Hill in Cuba to attack the 'enemy', portrayed as a National Semi competitor and its executives (from Texas Instruments, I seem to remember). In another, Charlie and his team are represented at the Custer's Battle of the Little Big Horn up against either Intel or Motorola, or both. Whether he and his executives were in the middle, fighting the Indians, or whether they were the Indians, battling their way in through the defences, I don't remember.   The spirit of "Hey, let's have some fun" initiated by National infected their competitors. I was involved in some of these projects and for a while I became the go-to guy for fun collateral documentation (brochures, promotional material, etc.) by companies who wanted to get into the spirit of things.   One project for which I contracted was with Intel Corp. founder Bob Noyce, Executive VP Andy Grove, and several of their executives. They wanted a brochure for the company's sales conference. The brochure I wrote had a Star Trek theme, with Noyce, Grove and Intel engineers represented as crew members of the United Federation of Planets Starship Enterprise. Intel's competitors – TI, National, Toshiba, Motorola, NEC and others—were all represented as various alien star empires battling for domination of this particular segment of the Milky Way galaxy. I think National Semiconductor was portrayed as either the Romulan or Klingon Empires.   I remember those years as a time of excitement, intensity, and constant challenge, most of it in earnest. But most of all, it is the high-spirited fun that I remember – and miss, because at the corporate level, it seems to be gone from today's high tech industry culture, although at the individual and work group level the humour and fun are still there, as many of the tales told in posts to EELife attest.   Psychologists tell us that a sense of humour is essential to sanity, so the disappearance of playfulness at higher levels in corporations, the loss of willingness to not take themselves too seriously, is troubling. Sure, the U.S. has two wars going on and is on the brink of a third. We're dealing with terrorists and revolutions and a potential oil crisis. And we are just now coming out of serious recession.   But things weren't much different then. Throughout the period I am talking about we had various serious issues facing the nation: The Vietnam conflict. Violent demonstrations. Race riots. At least two serious recessions. Inflation. And the U.S. was on the edge of losing its edge in semiconductor ICs to the Japanese.   In spite of these troubling conditions corporations felt secure enough to risk being goofy once in a while. Now, they do not seem to have any humour left in their obsessive search for profitability.   In terms of maturity, those were the days of the industry's adolescence. So maybe it is a matter of age. Now the industry is in middle age and upper management seems to have lost its spirit for such sanity-preserving pranks.