Or turned into a Hot Potato. heh I'm watching this on my laptop running on a Micron/Crucial SSD, a great drive with no issues and still 97% life left after 5 years. :)
This video has it all, from starch to finish - Idaho, potato farmers and their link to Micron, and it's from one of my favourite Tubers. Rooting for you!
This video took me back to my days living in Boise, working as an engineer at the Hewlett Packard plant there. But by far the biggest surprise was you mentioning J. R Simplot. Once, at an agricultural fair in Boise, I was looking at a pen of sheep and started talking to tall man standing next to me if he knew anything about parasites in sheep. He did, and he spent about 20 minutes telling me things to do to eradicate the parasite. After I thanked him and walked away, I realized I spent the last 20 minutes talking to Mr. J.R. Simplot himself about sheep parasites. Only in Boise!
That’s no rumor. It’s fact. It aligned with the simplot financial year because he was the key investor and Simplot was in September because of the potato harvest.
Why? The United States were the land of capital and investment. Sadly, with all these publicly traded corporations and big banks running the show, that is no longer the case...
Crazy, I'm from Idaho, and I grew up in Blackfoot. Surreal, but also not surprised to see my little town come up here. The man that invented the vacuum tube TV was born a couple towns over as well!
I thank Fairchild Semiconductor, they invested in Indonesia by establishing a manufacturing facility in Indonesia in 1973. Alas, the Suharto's crony capitalism & chronic corruption failed the country's economy. That and Fairchild was being under internal problems (later it was sold to National Semiconductor). So the Fairchild Semiconductor moved out from the country in 1985.
So nice for Micron to finally get their place in the sun on this channel. Firms like Fairchild, National, Motorola, IBM, TI, Intel, AMD/GF, TSMC, UMC, and Samsung are all very well documented. But most of the memory guys and the smaller guys like Micron, ST-M, and Sandisk, the three or so Taiwanese DRAM makers are less well documented. Maybe sandisk, IMF, NEC, Hitachi (be it as a semi maker or a tool maker), Toshibia, or the Taiwanese DRAM makers before getting scooped up by Micron are worth going into next? Or maybe the survivors of the Japanese collapse like Elpida and Renesas?
I started with Micron in Boise, and I’m now with Micron in Taiwan and have been with Micron for 10 years. It’s interesting to see how some of the fundamental ideals of past Micron are still with us today.
I have one friend left still working there. The 'new' CEO (post- Durcan anyway) is a Silicon Valley guy. The company is essentially run from there these days. Boise still has the big fabs and such of course.
2 videos a week with actual content. Month after months like a clockwork. Informative, not just rambling like many other youtubers do... How to you find time for that? Serious question, do you have a team that helps to research all the info or are you simply a sponge that absorbed everything over decades?
Wendover Products has equal if not greater content (this channel is good for history though), but then again Wendover Productions is a huge production, no pun.
@@Dogo.R Well Wikipedia gets a lot of things wrong about things I know about, but they usually, like most sources of general information, broadly get things right. For a general audience you have to aim for "center mass" and also play to their prejudices. Fun fact on prejudices: next time you hear how the Fed Reserve will influence the economy by cutting interest rates (or raising them) just remember this is fiction, money is largely neutral (except for a few days) and the Federal Reserve decisions have hardly any real impact on the economy. Yet pundits routinely obsess over the Fed. Source: numerous real world examples but here's a stem paper: MONEY, REAL INTEREST RATES, AND OUTPUT: A REINTERPRETATION OF POSTWAR U.S. DATA, Robert B. Litterman, Laurence Weiss Working Paper No. 1077, NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH, February 1983, "Taken literally, our results imply that monetary policy has not discernably affected the real rate, although it has causally influenced nominal interest rates"
@@raylopez99 I’m talking about the latest video with some park on a cliff and he purposely avoided mentioning a wrongful death lawsuit they’re in and didn’t disclose it was a partner video except for a pinned comment later.
Maybe MT ram was affordable at the time and build to a cost. but wherever they cut a corner too much or just lacked the experience, their chips are not made for eternity. If you look at a PCB in malfunction, and there is MT ram: Swap them out and chances are >50% that the issue is already fixed.
On the other hand, what you hear is the success stories. How many times did people have trust and optimism and encouraged people only to see their money going down the drain? Don't get me wrong, no risk no reward, but risk does necessarily lead to reward.
6:09 is a neighborhood in Portland called Boise. As a lifelong Boisean I was completely stumped trying to figure out where this picture was taken from.
Wow I had forgotten about the RAM wars, but then when you were replaying it for me the memories came back. Everyone thought Micron was foolish, but they held on and made it big. I wish we had these type of people in Maine.
Odd. I'm pretty sure I left Texas Instruments (my first time) in 1997, but I'd already heard about the sale of their memory business to Micron. Perhaps it had been rumor and the deal hadn't been finalized yet. TI's memory IP and their ability to integrate differing types of memory onto custom VLSI chips was a huge competitive advantage. I remember talking with a few teammates, thinking that this was a good short-term move, but the sale would cause us to lose the engineers that were producing these technologies and the associated patents, so long term this seemed like it could be a bad trend for TI. The sale of the memory business was hot on the heels of the sale of the defense contracting business to Raytheon, which was also hot on the heals of the death of Jerry Junkins and his replacement by Tom Engibus. In fact these were just to the two largest divisions that were sold during my relatively short stint at TI after Tom Engibus took over - there were other smaller ones sold or shut down in quick succession. We used to joke about the "Engibus-only Model" - that being the idea that TI could be paired down to just Tom Engibus and the legal team used to enforce their patents. We joked that the company's EPS would skyrocket, making lots of money for any shareholders remaining after lots of buy-backs, because TI was raking in huge profits from just royalty payments. Tom Engibus could just keep giving himself raise after raise as he made the company more profitable this way. Sidebar: I used to work in Module B at the Forest Lane facility in Dallas. My cubicle had a view of the circle at the front entryway. After Engibus took over, he had a giant sundial put in the circle there. Just after I left the company, he and the entire C-suite took over Module B and Engibus's office took over the cubicles where I and my teammates had been located because it was arguably the nicest view at the Forest Lane facility.
I had no idea that Micron's origin story was so fascinating❤ Like the video says, it's a commodity, and so you tend not to give it a second thought... I have gravitated towards their brand in the last 15 years or so, as I feel they have had a solid value offering. This video has me feeling a little proud to be a loyal customer 🥲 Us farmboys gotta stick together ❤️
@@YolandaPlayne They have released about two videos every week for the last year. If they've stockpiled them that would be even more impressive given it means they've previously created more than they released. Ultimately a delay in release doesn't really mean anything given they are not news.
@@phipli Some of these videos are a lot easier to make. Still. He either has a lot of help or it's his full time job. Pewdiepie did one or two videos a day and was still able to have a personal life.
I have always been happy with Micron. Any time I bought SIMMs from them, they just install and worked perfectly. They never went bad, and I only got rid of them when my computer got too old and I needed another one. I nothing but good to say about Micron.
Micron also excelled in an area nobody else was even trying: selling direct to consumers. They were the first to allow a regular user to look up their PC and find the right memory for it, and then sell it. It sounds like a nothing task today. You just Google it. But this didn't exist in those days. You had to know someone at a shop or a friend. But Crucial made it easy for grandma or anyone else. And the memory itself was quality. Micron has always been top-shelf stuff. Maybe not the fastest or covered in shiny, but it works without issue. Micron earned a reputation for being extremely reliable and trustworthy. I am glad they have remained successful. Well done.
I think you can draw a lot of parallels in the economics of producing memory and producing potatoes, in the end both require a ruthless and resilient business strategy, if there was anyone who could do it, it was these guys from Idaho.
I once sent away for a product spec sheet from these guys. They sent me five 3-inch thick books with all the detailed specifications of every memory product they offered. They were considered the pinnacle of reliable RAM back in the day, don't know if they still hold that crown now.
I was employeed in MT since 1998 to 2012. TI sold its memory business in a desperate attempt to not close factories without a return. Their memory architecture, trench-based (the capacitor built in depth in the substrate, below the gate), had reached the physical shrink limit. MT had an architecture that grew the capacitor over the gate, so that could have a much more space to expand its surface, in 3D. All trench-based suppliers went belly up around the millennium change (Siemens-Qimonda, the Japanese). Elpida, a JV of the last japanese, lasted until 2012, when it was acquired by MT. Only koreans and MT survive in the DRAM arena.
Thank you for the Mostek background info you provided in this video. I worked at Mostek between 1980 and 1985 and experienced some of its innovations directly. I worked for a boss who was one of the designers for the telecom and consumer chips Mostek was known for. It was quite sad to see Mostek falter, but life moves on!
Hudson's bay was a British Fur Trading company that started way back in 1670s 200 years before Canada was even born, even before the founding of Upper Canada. It was focused on trading around Rupert's Land. that is all the land whose rivers drained into the Hudson Bay of Canada. That was in those old days, a land that took weeks to trek and canoe up rivers in. The Hudson Bay, now known as The Bay, had trading pasts all over Northern Ontario, Quebec, and All of what is now all the Canadian Provinces. They even had trading posts as far south at Minnesota, Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. My home city, Edmonton, was founded along the North Saskatchewan River when it was called Fort Edmonton. All the major Canadian Prairie Province cities were founded by The Hudson Bay long before the two great Canadian Railways were established. It was one of the oldest companies to still exist to this day.
I never even knew that Micron's early history was that crazy. Honestly, they really owe it to Allen Noble for just believing in them, his decision and ability to get other investors was their saving grace.
Wonderful video, thank you so much! As a former Micron employee I really appreciated learning this detailed history of Micron in a way that I hadn’t before. Followed and looking forward to more videos like this!
I just moved from California to Boise for Micron. If I remember correctly, MIcron used to sell IBM compatible pcs in the 90s. I remember my uncle's company in Fremont, CA selling Micron and SuperMicro computers. I think they were AT/XT something.. LOL Thanks for the history on Micron. Great video.
I have done chip layout for Micron Imaging, and there is a fascinating trade-off between making an analog chip with a digital macro imported into the design, vs making a digital chip with the analog macro imported in the design. And then, even if you decide to build a digital chip which is most efficient usually there is a choice between scripting the chip and interactive layout more like analog layout. It is about making power rails for synthesizing and routing logic cells on, and when you need to suddenly move everything around for some reason it is usually the more flexible interactive approach that pays off😂 Those were the times! And imaging was using the equipmwnt that was to obsolete to even make memory with...
A royal charter from King Charles II incorporated "The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England, trading into Hudson's Bay" on 2 May 1670. The Hudson Bay Company has a well recorded history.
I'm Amazed how often these success stories start at Fairchild. It must have ben a truly Amazing collection of talented people working there at certain times.
The name Boise is almost certainly an adaptation of the French phrase "Les Bois" or the woods. It's not a strange name when you realize settlers came from the east over a long travel in the desert only to stumble into an improved microclimate with miles of wooded riverfront and even today the city is also frequently called the "city of trees". There is also a strong influence of Basque(French/Spanish border region) immigrants in the city's history.
This is the official narrative we run with. Wikipedia says the origin is uncertain, but you can read Idaho government websites and the naming always related to French-Canadian settlers and the area being heavily wooded
I remember their old -8B PC100 speed grade needed its own spec, unlike Samsung, Toshiba, Infineon, Hynix, IIBM, and everyone else. But they were always clever, squeezing the most out of the old equipment.
I'm from Idaho and I'm an AI engineer. Went to school in Micron funded Engineering building at Boise State, and currently, I work for Lamb Weston (guess what they make?). I used to work for OnSemi..
Great video but how can you do a video on Micron without even a mention of Steve Appleton?? He moved through the ranks moving from line worker to CEO and kept Micron afloat during some rough times. Unfortunately, his experimental airplane hobby led to his early death. I knew Steve. Steve was a close friend of mine. He was a phenomenal CEO and human being.
This was a very good review of how micron started and survived its first 15 years. But yeah, I would love to see a follow up video starting with the Appleton years and going through today, taking Micron from “just big enough to survive” to thriving with the biggest companies in the world
Good old school American investors that built America. They knew risk and reward. Wall street investors shriek at the idea of risk of making 8% profit instead of 10%.
Ive never listened to one of your videos and wanted to tear up and cry... Makes me proud to be an American and lucky to be born in this country. Thank you for showing so much love and respect to this country and its citizens. It means alot more than you know.
I've been trying to help him pronounce terms of the art like an industry insider or even just someone who follows the industry, but he apparently thinks his way is better. Well, it's actually slightly insulting.
Another trivia: One time the only bug requiring to modify the very expensive metal 1 mask was to break a direct link from one logic gate output to the input of the one sitting just to the right of it. The piece of metal removed was one square of minimum width metal 1 say 0.15 micrometer or whatever it was at a cost of 100.000 usd reported for such a mask set! The price per square meter removed from the design was usd 4444444000000000000
Nicely done. A suggestion. The current CEO of Micron Technology Sanjay Mehrotra. He is one of the founders of Sandisk. His cofounders are Jack Yuan, Eli Harari,. Sandisk is now owned by WD. All very well credentialled.
What a great story, equally impressive are the original funders who, with zero knowledge were willing to put their money up, that takes guts and a belief in the guys setting up the venture.
It’s nice to have someone who talks about interesting subjects I’m so tiered of this brainless Mr beast type content it’s sad that there is so few people who are interested in content like this.
Worked in Micron Singapore & HR told us a less detailed version of this story during my first week there. Really impressive that potato money created Micron & was really lucky to get to work in Boise for 6 months
My first Zenith 8088 PC had twenty-four Micron 256K memory chips in it, so that I reached the 640 KB that DOS 3.3 was capable of addressing. I paid about $ 300 for the RAM, and a similar amount for a thirty Megabytes hard drive...
Another proof marketing schools only creates close minded executives. The potato billionnaires who funded Micron didn't understand what they were doing, but they saw the talent and the determination
After the Samsung SSD firmware issues, I jumped ship to Micron (Crucial). They still seem to position themselves as the budget option, but I know that in the DDR4 RAM space, a few years ago, their chips were among the fastest, most overclockable. I might get their RAMs too in my next build.
I was born in the mid-‘80s and grew up on a farm in Idaho. I first learned of Micron when my Mother bought our first PC in ‘96. Up until then my Dad had always purchased cheap Apple computers from Sun Remarketing in Logan, UT, including a Lisa that was saved from the Logan landfill. The PC was a Win95 Micron Millennia Pentium 233 MHz with 32MB SDRAM, a 3dfx graphics card, and a 3GB hard drive with a 2GB partition and a 1GB partition. (I grew up thinking my PC had two physical hard drives inside. I was very surprised to find there was only one hard disk when I opened the PC case for the first time.) My Father nearly killed me when I gutted that PC and put in an AMD Athlon and Nvidia TNT2 graphics card. He thought I’d never get it to work and that I had destroyed his very expensive computer. In high school is when I first learned Micron is an Idaho company and I remember being extremely proud to be an Idahoan when I drove by the Micron factory on my first trip to Boise.
I met Ron Yanke a handful of times in the early 1990s. He would come into a restaurant where I worked in downtown Boise and always pay the bill, no matter who he was with, but would never leave a tip. All the servers would try to avoid having him sit in their section because they knew this.
Had no idea. I'm in Simplot country. Phenomenal ag formulations for this region. I'm a network security architect. Here I thought I was some sort of anomaly having my feet in both agriculture and large provider networks. I couldn't dig these guys ditches.
The number of potato farming-made millionaires involved in the founding of Micron really gives a new meaning to "it runs on a potato"
They even created a potato, right? The Idaho Potato.
Or turned into a Hot Potato. heh I'm watching this on my laptop running on a Micron/Crucial SSD, a great drive with no issues and still 97% life left after 5 years. :)
From potato chips to silicon chips.
16:01 Finally we learn who coined the term "potato camera", it was the MicronCamera!
@@rarbiart - The potato comments are just hilarious... yep, reading them on my couch potato.
This video has it all, from starch to finish - Idaho, potato farmers and their link to Micron, and it's from one of my favourite Tubers. Rooting for you!
😂
Disgusting 😅
*slow clap* 😂 Very nice.
I assume you'll see yourself out? :P
Please tip your servers
This video took me back to my days living in Boise, working as an engineer at the Hewlett Packard plant there. But by far the biggest surprise was you mentioning J. R Simplot. Once, at an agricultural fair in Boise, I was looking at a pen of sheep and started talking to tall man standing next to me if he knew anything about parasites in sheep. He did, and he spent about 20 minutes telling me things to do to eradicate the parasite. After I thanked him and walked away, I realized I spent the last 20 minutes talking to Mr. J.R. Simplot himself about sheep parasites. Only in Boise!
A bunch of farmers funding Micron is one of the craziest stories I've heard to date
Rumor is Micron’s fiscal year starts in September cause it’s the potato harvest.
That’s no rumor. It’s fact. It aligned with the simplot financial year because he was the key investor and Simplot was in September because of the potato harvest.
It's like a weirdly wholesome origin story in a way.
Potato farmers love chips.
Why? The United States were the land of capital and investment. Sadly, with all these publicly traded corporations and big banks running the show, that is no longer the case...
There is something poetic about potato billionaires investing in high tech chips. Love it!
it's all chips!
Ironic
Mr Incredible: Chips is chips!
Crazy, I'm from Idaho, and I grew up in Blackfoot. Surreal, but also not surprised to see my little town come up here. The man that invented the vacuum tube TV was born a couple towns over as well!
It’s truly insane how critical Fairchild Semiconductor was to virtually every chip company who exists today.
I thank Fairchild Semiconductor, they invested in Indonesia by establishing a manufacturing facility in Indonesia in 1973. Alas, the Suharto's crony capitalism & chronic corruption failed the country's economy. That and Fairchild was being under internal problems (later it was sold to National Semiconductor). So the Fairchild Semiconductor moved out from the country in 1985.
Quite True: the Co-Founders of Intel, a lot of Talent, including Andy Grove all came from Fairchild Semiconductor.
@@ericanderson2987 and NCR, and AMD, and ….
So nice for Micron to finally get their place in the sun on this channel. Firms like Fairchild, National, Motorola, IBM, TI, Intel, AMD/GF, TSMC, UMC, and Samsung are all very well documented. But most of the memory guys and the smaller guys like Micron, ST-M, and Sandisk, the three or so Taiwanese DRAM makers are less well documented. Maybe sandisk, IMF, NEC, Hitachi (be it as a semi maker or a tool maker), Toshibia, or the Taiwanese DRAM makers before getting scooped up by Micron are worth going into next? Or maybe the survivors of the Japanese collapse like Elpida and Renesas?
It would be cool to know more about Micron’s history past ~2000, as they did buy out Elpida
This is perhaps the best channel about semiconductor industry history. Congratulations and best wishes for you.
I started with Micron in Boise, and I’m now with Micron in Taiwan and have been with Micron for 10 years. It’s interesting to see how some of the fundamental ideals of past Micron are still with us today.
Bro how do you get a job with them? Can you teach me? I would do anything
@@MidnightV6 I graduated with an engineering degree and applied at the career fair. Pretty standard way to get a job I guess.
I can’t even think of topics as fast as you publish videos. Your quality and consistency are unreal, keep up the great work!
Micron Alumni here, great video... brings back good and bad memories... pun intended
Alumnus. Unless you are more than one person.
@@briancase6180 I guess the proper term is a former employee
I liked the video, a bit
I have one friend left still working there. The 'new' CEO (post- Durcan anyway) is a Silicon Valley guy. The company is essentially run from there these days. Boise still has the big fabs and such of course.
2 videos a week with actual content. Month after months like a clockwork. Informative, not just rambling like many other youtubers do... How to you find time for that? Serious question, do you have a team that helps to research all the info or are you simply a sponge that absorbed everything over decades?
Wendover Products has equal if not greater content (this channel is good for history though), but then again Wendover Productions is a huge production, no pun.
@@raylopez99I don't know about that, wendover gets a lot of stuff wrong whenever I watch things I know about.
@@Dogo.R Well Wikipedia gets a lot of things wrong about things I know about, but they usually, like most sources of general information, broadly get things right. For a general audience you have to aim for "center mass" and also play to their prejudices. Fun fact on prejudices: next time you hear how the Fed Reserve will influence the economy by cutting interest rates (or raising them) just remember this is fiction, money is largely neutral (except for a few days) and the Federal Reserve decisions have hardly any real impact on the economy. Yet pundits routinely obsess over the Fed. Source: numerous real world examples but here's a stem paper: MONEY, REAL INTEREST RATES, AND OUTPUT: A REINTERPRETATION OF POSTWAR U.S. DATA, Robert B. Litterman, Laurence Weiss Working Paper No. 1077, NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH, February 1983, "Taken literally, our results imply that monetary policy has not discernably affected the real rate, although it has causally influenced nominal interest rates"
@@raylopez99 wendover has become bendover after his latest theme park promo video.
@@raylopez99 I’m talking about the latest video with some park on a cliff and he purposely avoided mentioning a wrongful death lawsuit they’re in and didn’t disclose it was a partner video except for a pinned comment later.
MT ram 64kbit, one of the 4 apocalyptic horsemen of retrocomputing, together with VARTA accumulator, DURACELL batteries and RIFA capacitors.
Maybe MT ram was affordable at the time and build to a cost. but wherever they cut a corner too much or just lacked the experience, their chips are not made for eternity. If you look at a PCB in malfunction, and there is MT ram: Swap them out and chances are >50% that the issue is already fixed.
no wonder why this ram sucked. It was some of the earliest stuff pumped out by some potato boys.
The trust, encouragement, and optimism that Yanke, Noble, and Simplot showed the Parkinsons is so inspiring.
On the other hand, what you hear is the success stories. How many times did people have trust and optimism and encouraged people only to see their money going down the drain? Don't get me wrong, no risk no reward, but risk does necessarily lead to reward.
6:09 is a neighborhood in Portland called Boise. As a lifelong Boisean I was completely stumped trying to figure out where this picture was taken from.
Wow I had forgotten about the RAM wars, but then when you were replaying it for me the memories came back. Everyone thought Micron was foolish, but they held on and made it big. I wish we had these type of people in Maine.
Odd. I'm pretty sure I left Texas Instruments (my first time) in 1997, but I'd already heard about the sale of their memory business to Micron. Perhaps it had been rumor and the deal hadn't been finalized yet. TI's memory IP and their ability to integrate differing types of memory onto custom VLSI chips was a huge competitive advantage. I remember talking with a few teammates, thinking that this was a good short-term move, but the sale would cause us to lose the engineers that were producing these technologies and the associated patents, so long term this seemed like it could be a bad trend for TI.
The sale of the memory business was hot on the heels of the sale of the defense contracting business to Raytheon, which was also hot on the heals of the death of Jerry Junkins and his replacement by Tom Engibus. In fact these were just to the two largest divisions that were sold during my relatively short stint at TI after Tom Engibus took over - there were other smaller ones sold or shut down in quick succession. We used to joke about the "Engibus-only Model" - that being the idea that TI could be paired down to just Tom Engibus and the legal team used to enforce their patents. We joked that the company's EPS would skyrocket, making lots of money for any shareholders remaining after lots of buy-backs, because TI was raking in huge profits from just royalty payments. Tom Engibus could just keep giving himself raise after raise as he made the company more profitable this way.
Sidebar: I used to work in Module B at the Forest Lane facility in Dallas. My cubicle had a view of the circle at the front entryway. After Engibus took over, he had a giant sundial put in the circle there. Just after I left the company, he and the entire C-suite took over Module B and Engibus's office took over the cubicles where I and my teammates had been located because it was arguably the nicest view at the Forest Lane facility.
I had no idea that Micron's origin story was so fascinating❤
Like the video says, it's a commodity, and so you tend not to give it a second thought... I have gravitated towards their brand in the last 15 years or so, as I feel they have had a solid value offering. This video has me feeling a little proud to be a loyal customer 🥲 Us farmboys gotta stick together ❤️
I suspect that Asianometry can make any story fascinating.
Anxiously awaiting Part 2; Micron culture, Micron R&D, and the last 25 years, including growth overseas.
I really don't know how you're able to find the time to research, record and edit such comprehensive videos so frequently. Good work.
A lot of his videos are over a year old and available on his patreon and aren't released until later.
@@YolandaPlayne They have released about two videos every week for the last year. If they've stockpiled them that would be even more impressive given it means they've previously created more than they released. Ultimately a delay in release doesn't really mean anything given they are not news.
@@phipli Some of these videos are a lot easier to make. Still. He either has a lot of help or it's his full time job. Pewdiepie did one or two videos a day and was still able to have a personal life.
I’ve been waiting for this one for a while.
same
I have always been happy with Micron. Any time I bought SIMMs from them, they just install and worked perfectly. They never went bad, and I only got rid of them when my computer got too old and I needed another one. I nothing but good to say about Micron.
Having worked for some of these your documentaries are always fascinating, thank you for your work and for sharing
Micron also excelled in an area nobody else was even trying: selling direct to consumers. They were the first to allow a regular user to look up their PC and find the right memory for it, and then sell it. It sounds like a nothing task today. You just Google it. But this didn't exist in those days. You had to know someone at a shop or a friend. But Crucial made it easy for grandma or anyone else. And the memory itself was quality. Micron has always been top-shelf stuff. Maybe not the fastest or covered in shiny, but it works without issue. Micron earned a reputation for being extremely reliable and trustworthy. I am glad they have remained successful. Well done.
I think you can draw a lot of parallels in the economics of producing memory and producing potatoes, in the end both require a ruthless and resilient business strategy, if there was anyone who could do it, it was these guys from Idaho.
I once sent away for a product spec sheet from these guys. They sent me five 3-inch thick books with all the detailed specifications of every memory product they offered. They were considered the pinnacle of reliable RAM back in the day, don't know if they still hold that crown now.
Hi from Manassas, Virginia, about two miles from a Micron fab.
If Dottie still works there, and you see her, tell here I said 'hi'
I’ve been waiting for the Micron episode!!! Thanks Asianometry
Love your tech industry history lessons. Thanks for what you do
Ok, two days in a row I thought the show was so good and on point I felt compelled to send a Thanks donation. Stellar content, thank you.
I was employeed in MT since 1998 to 2012. TI sold its memory business in a desperate attempt to not close factories without a return. Their memory architecture, trench-based (the capacitor built in depth in the substrate, below the gate), had reached the physical shrink limit. MT had an architecture that grew the capacitor over the gate, so that could have a much more space to expand its surface, in 3D. All trench-based suppliers went belly up around the millennium change (Siemens-Qimonda, the Japanese). Elpida, a JV of the last japanese, lasted until 2012, when it was acquired by MT.
Only koreans and MT survive in the DRAM arena.
Thanks!
Thank you for the Mostek background info you provided in this video. I worked at Mostek between 1980 and 1985 and experienced some of its innovations directly. I worked for a boss who was one of the designers for the telecom and consumer chips Mostek was known for. It was quite sad to see Mostek falter, but life moves on!
Hudson's bay was a British Fur Trading company that started way back in 1670s 200 years before Canada was even born, even before the founding of Upper Canada. It was focused on trading around Rupert's Land. that is all the land whose rivers drained into the Hudson Bay of Canada. That was in those old days, a land that took weeks to trek and canoe up rivers in. The Hudson Bay, now known as The Bay, had trading pasts all over Northern Ontario, Quebec, and All of what is now all the Canadian Provinces. They even had trading posts as far south at Minnesota, Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. My home city, Edmonton, was founded along the North Saskatchewan River when it was called Fort Edmonton. All the major Canadian Prairie Province cities were founded by The Hudson Bay long before the two great Canadian Railways were established. It was one of the oldest companies to still exist to this day.
Les Bois! The trees!
I never even knew that Micron's early history was that crazy. Honestly, they really owe it to Allen Noble for just believing in them, his decision and ability to get other investors was their saving grace.
Wonderful video, thank you so much! As a former Micron employee I really appreciated learning this detailed history of Micron in a way that I hadn’t before. Followed and looking forward to more videos like this!
I worked at Micron for 14 years. Lots of good memories and a company with a hell of a history.
I love your insight into the history of the semiconductor industry. I would love to see a video on the analog chipmakers TI, NXP, and Infineon.
man i missed around 500 videos from you, what a time to be alive! lets get to it...
I just moved from California to Boise for Micron. If I remember correctly, MIcron used to sell IBM compatible pcs in the 90s. I remember my uncle's company in Fremont, CA selling Micron and SuperMicro computers. I think they were AT/XT something.. LOL Thanks for the history on Micron. Great video.
Thank you, Jon.
You put together a fascinating bit of history.
Name's origin is obvious: from French "bois" (woods) or "boisée" (wooded)
So me and the boys in de bois?
@@westrim No it's me and the boy-see
I just got done reading about them in chip wars. So cool to see a video about them. Such an amazing startup.
Fascinating story. You really can't make this stuff up. Keep up the good work. 5 Stars 🌟
I have done chip layout for Micron Imaging, and there is a fascinating trade-off between making an analog chip with a digital macro imported into the design, vs making a digital chip with the analog macro imported in the design. And then, even if you decide to build a digital chip which is most efficient usually there is a choice between scripting the chip and interactive layout more like analog layout. It is about making power rails for synthesizing and routing logic cells on, and when you need to suddenly move everything around for some reason it is usually the more flexible interactive approach that pays off😂 Those were the times! And imaging was using the equipmwnt that was to obsolete to even make memory with...
I guess Idaho couldn’t make up its mind if it should make potato chips or memory chips so it just decided to go for both 😂
A royal charter from King Charles II incorporated "The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England, trading into Hudson's Bay" on 2 May 1670. The Hudson Bay Company has a well recorded history.
Still exists today… under a less recognized name… Target
😃
I'm Amazed how often these success stories start at Fairchild. It must have ben a truly Amazing collection of talented people working there at certain times.
As Jon said, you could not make this story up. Worthy of a Michael Lewis book.
The name Boise is almost certainly an adaptation of the French phrase "Les Bois" or the woods. It's not a strange name when you realize settlers came from the east over a long travel in the desert only to stumble into an improved microclimate with miles of wooded riverfront and even today the city is also frequently called the "city of trees". There is also a strong influence of Basque(French/Spanish border region) immigrants in the city's history.
This is the official narrative we run with. Wikipedia says the origin is uncertain, but you can read Idaho government websites and the naming always related to French-Canadian settlers and the area being heavily wooded
I’ve been waiting for this one!
You have the best history videos and I’d love to learn more about my new employer. 😄
I remember their old -8B PC100 speed grade needed its own spec, unlike Samsung, Toshiba, Infineon, Hynix, IIBM, and everyone else. But they were always clever, squeezing the most out of the old equipment.
Thank you for this! It was uncommonly interesting and unusually personal.
I'm from Idaho and I'm an AI engineer. Went to school in Micron funded Engineering building at Boise State, and currently, I work for Lamb Weston (guess what they make?). I used to work for OnSemi..
What a story . I was a young man back then and I remember some of this.
Great video but how can you do a video on Micron without even a mention of Steve Appleton?? He moved through the ranks moving from line worker to CEO and kept Micron afloat during some rough times. Unfortunately, his experimental airplane hobby led to his early death. I knew Steve. Steve was a close friend of mine. He was a phenomenal CEO and human being.
This was a very good review of how micron started and survived its first 15 years. But yeah, I would love to see a follow up video starting with the Appleton years and going through today, taking Micron from “just big enough to survive” to thriving with the biggest companies in the world
i'm increaingly convinced that your channel should be a university course. superb video once again.
My family lives in Blackfoot. I never knew the founders of Micron grew up there.
Incredible story of resilience! Micron’s rise shows the power of persistence and innovation in the semiconductor industry.
Boise is also the home of HP laserjet division. For many years, HP also used to design and make server hard drives in Boise.
Good old school American investors that built America. They knew risk and reward. Wall street investors shriek at the idea of risk of making 8% profit instead of 10%.
I bought a Micron PC back in the 80's or 90's. It was great!
What great story. Been using their products for decades but never knew any of it.
micron is safe as long as those savvy business-engineers stay alive
Ah yes, the MT4164 64K DRAM, the bane of retrocomputer enthusiasts worldwide
Commodore 64, i remember them
finally we learn why they are so cursed.
Ive never listened to one of your videos and wanted to tear up and cry... Makes me proud to be an American and lucky to be born in this country. Thank you for showing so much love and respect to this country and its citizens. It means alot more than you know.
DRAM is pronounced DEE-ram
Tramiel is pronounced truh-MELL
And Boise is pronounced BOY-see.
You must be new here LOL
@@Martinit0 No, but hope springs eternal ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I've been trying to help him pronounce terms of the art like an industry insider or even just someone who follows the industry, but he apparently thinks his way is better. Well, it's actually slightly insulting.
No one likes a pedant. relaxe
You have a nice variety of topics you cover. Thanks!
The name Boise was named by french Canadians in the 18th century because the area was covered with trees boise means wooded area in french
Another trivia: One time the only bug requiring to modify the very expensive metal 1 mask was to break a direct link from one logic gate output to the input of the one sitting just to the right of it. The piece of metal removed was one square of minimum width metal 1 say 0.15 micrometer or whatever it was at a cost of 100.000 usd reported for such a mask set! The price per square meter removed from the design was usd 4444444000000000000
Noble Foods is still around but I think they were acquired at one point.
Nicely done. A suggestion. The current CEO of Micron Technology Sanjay Mehrotra. He is one of the founders of Sandisk. His cofounders are Jack Yuan, Eli Harari,. Sandisk is now owned by WD. All very well credentialled.
What a great story, equally impressive are the original funders who, with zero knowledge were willing to put their money up, that takes guts and a belief in the guys setting up the venture.
It’s nice to have someone who talks about interesting subjects I’m so tiered of this brainless Mr beast type content it’s sad that there is so few people who are interested in content like this.
1:19 "sprouted" I see what you did there 🥔🌱
16:02 that camera from "potato chip billionaires" feels like a missed pun.
This video gives a whole new meaning to the term, Potato Pc
As a player of all versions of Trevor Chan's Capitalism, I found this youtube very entertaining.
Just seen Intel using Micron on their new Ultra chip, Go Micron. I put a few million of them on Echostar designs a decade ago.
Worked in Micron Singapore & HR told us a less detailed version of this story during my first week there. Really impressive that potato money created Micron & was really lucky to get to work in Boise for 6 months
Yeah!! Let's go Idaho!! Love your videos man
My first Zenith 8088 PC had twenty-four Micron 256K memory chips in it, so that I reached the 640 KB that DOS 3.3 was capable of addressing. I paid about $ 300 for the RAM, and a similar amount for a thirty Megabytes hard drive...
Just driving through Idaho...you see a huge Micron sign and wonder what they are doing out here....
I love everything about this story. All these dudes that have nothing to do with technology go all in.
Got to love American tech I've got a few shares of micron, and I am a fan of their crucial brand external SSDs
Micron Technology beat the tech naysayers, that's no small matter.
Another proof marketing schools only creates close minded executives. The potato billionnaires who funded Micron didn't understand what they were doing, but they saw the talent and the determination
After the Samsung SSD firmware issues, I jumped ship to Micron (Crucial). They still seem to position themselves as the budget option, but I know that in the DDR4 RAM space, a few years ago, their chips were among the fastest, most overclockable. I might get their RAMs too in my next build.
8:03 legit thought that photo was the Beastie Boys dressing up
"I can't stand it, i know you planned it!"
Wow! That was a he'll of a ride. Nice job!
My favorite performance RAM
"scared straight, for semi-conductor investors"; perfect, simply perfect.
Potato and Sheep Farmers! This is one of the wildest stories I've heard
I was born in the mid-‘80s and grew up on a farm in Idaho. I first learned of Micron when my Mother bought our first PC in ‘96.
Up until then my Dad had always purchased cheap Apple computers from Sun Remarketing in Logan, UT, including a Lisa that was saved from the Logan landfill.
The PC was a Win95 Micron Millennia Pentium 233 MHz with 32MB SDRAM, a 3dfx graphics card, and a 3GB hard drive with a 2GB partition and a 1GB partition. (I grew up thinking my PC had two physical hard drives inside. I was very surprised to find there was only one hard disk when I opened the PC case for the first time.) My Father nearly killed me when I gutted that PC and put in an AMD Athlon and Nvidia TNT2 graphics card. He thought I’d never get it to work and that I had destroyed his very expensive computer.
In high school is when I first learned Micron is an Idaho company and I remember being extremely proud to be an Idahoan when I drove by the Micron factory on my first trip to Boise.
Clay New York is north of Syracuse, near to GEs turbine factory that now belongs to Lockheed Martin.
I met Ron Yanke a handful of times in the early 1990s. He would come into a restaurant where I worked in downtown Boise and always pay the bill, no matter who he was with, but would never leave a tip. All the servers would try to avoid having him sit in their section because they knew this.
This should be a movie
Asianometry my beloved ❤❤❤
Had no idea. I'm in Simplot country. Phenomenal ag formulations for this region. I'm a network security architect. Here I thought I was some sort of anomaly having my feet in both agriculture and large provider networks. I couldn't dig these guys ditches.