SUNNYVALE (CA) - Chip firm Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) said it has entered into middle age and will be 40 years old on May 1st 2009.

The firm was set up by charismatic figure Jerry Sanders III and seven co-founders. AMD doesn't say who they are but one of them was Robert Noyce, a man who is usually associated with the opposition, that is to say the Intel Corporation. But Sanders was a top geezer at Fairchild. And many another semiconductor person was too.

At the INTC museum in Satan Clara, the business plan for Intel is scribbled down on the back of a fag packet. We don't know if AMD's business plan was scribbled down on the back of a bar tab, but we wouldn't be surprised if that was so.

AMD has set up a special web site, where employees share their 40th anniversary thoughts. And it's also setting up several competitions and you can see more about them at that page too.

For some reason you have to email photographs to Bite PR - this shows just how far the company has come since the days of Jerry Sanders III. He did his own PR, and did it rather more effectually than a warren of PR bunnies.

There's a little video mentioning people like Dirk Meyer, Jerry Sanders III and Fred Weber. Roger Pinero, who has been at AMD for 26 years, said: "Fred wanted to break down the wall so the team could work together. Fred went to the hardware store, got a sledgehammer, paints a bullseye on the wall, and knocked it down. That's how the K7 got the name Sledgehammer and we used it to hammer the Intel Corporation."

Comments (3)