Word: giant
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Behind every great fortune," Balzac wrote, "there is a crime." That's the contention of the stunning lawsuit filed last week by Digital Equipment Corp. against microchip giant Intel. The great fortune in this case comes courtesy of the Pentium microprocessing chip, which runs 85% of the earth's personal computers and helped feed Intel $6.45 billion in revenues in the first quarter of 1997 alone. The alleged crime is Intel's "willful infringement" on 10 Dig-ital patents in building the Pentium series. And the suggested punishment: damages that could run into the billions and an injunction against continued...
...week's end analysts were asking whether the Digital action was an honest plea for justice or just the bared-fang attack of a cornered and wounded animal. The tottering hardware giant had bet heavily on its $2.5 billion Alpha microprocessor to return it to prosperity. Alpha is unquestionably the fastest chip on the market, but its speed hasn't overcome Intel's marketing clout. In 1996, according to Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Mercury Research, Intel shipped some 65 million Pentium chips, or 76% of the microprocessor market, compared with 200,000 Alphas. And this year looks grimmer still: 18 million...
...months ago, rival Hewlett-Packard allied with Microsoft to push the software giant's Windows NT program into corporate servers, the machines that link large computer networks. In 1995 Digital had cut its own Microsoft deal, looking to the burgeoning NT market to fuel its growth. Instead, it is losing ground in a market already dominated by Intel, rather than Digital, chips...
BASEL, Switzerland: A year after its rivals Ciba Geigy and Sandoz combined to create the world's largest drug company just across town, Roche Holding is looking to catch up. Monday, the Swiss giant announced it will buy holding company Corange Inc. for $11 billion in a deal that will boost Roche's drug operations from tenth place to sixth in the worldwide medical diagnostics market. Roche will assume Corange's holdings in Germany's Boehringer Mannheim, a market leader in cardiovascular and cancer treatments. It will also gain an 84.2 percent stake in DePuy, a Warsaw, Indiana-based manufacturer...
...might think that someone who invented a giant electronic brain for Planet Earth would have a pretty impressive brain of his own. And Tim Berners-Lee, 41, the creator of the World Wide Web, no doubt does. But his brain also has one shortcoming, and, by his own account, this neural glitch may have been the key to the Web's inception...