October 30th, 1994
Intel's Pentium processor, released amid great fanfare and champagne corks just over an year earlier, has a minor flaw. However, the allegedly minor flaw and Intel's subsequent handling of the affair will end up costing the semiconductor giant half a billion. Yes, that's crisp, American Greenback.
Thomas Nicely, a professor of mathematics at Lynchburg College, was working on some programs to enumerate primes, twin primes, prime triplets, and prime quadruplets (If you are one of the peasants who do not know what that means, then you may satisfy yourself by knowing that they are complex algorithms for some of mathematics', and mankind's too, oldest fascinations). However, after adding a Pentium based machine to his cluster, his results started going off by a few points. After eliminating other possible causes like code error, motherboard fault etc., Nicely reported the problem to Intel.
Intel had discovered the bug a few months earlier but had stashed the skeleton in the closet. Intel, the lone aircraft carrier in a sea full of rubber dinghies, decided to show Nicely the same courtesy that a solitude loving person might show to a topless guy hoarding tissues and soap on a beach. To keep the skeleton there, Intel told Nicely that his observation was 'Fubar' and promptly ignored him.
Nicely, however, was not too hot about sulking in a corner and cursing Intel over a round of drinks. He decided to make full use of the then nascent internet and wrote a post on Usenet describing the problem in detail. He provided a simple calculation which could be used to determine if the processor was mathematically challenged or not. Needless to say, this caused a major stir in the geek community, who were the primary users of such bulletin boards. However, CNN decided to step on the gas and ran a story during prime time about the bug. Open the floodgates.
Intel finally publicly acknowledged that it had knowledge of the flaw since a few months and offered to replace the processor of anyone who could prove that he/she was affected by the bug. This led to a major backlash against Intel and its PR was criticised wide and far. The frenzy of consumers around the world equalled that of a school of sharks nose diving into sardines.
Intel finally buckled under tremendous consumer pressure and announced that it would replace all the flawed Pentiums, irrespective of whether they were being used to crack Fermat's last theorem, bake nuclear muffins or as a paper weight.
As for the defective chips, they were converted by Intel into key chains. Some of the original defective processors are now collectors items and used chips retail about US$100 on eBay
P.S. 1 If you are not too hot about what is Kryptonite, then it is the only known substance which can harm Superman. AMD's K line of processors such as K5 or K6 are named after this and is an 'unofficial' dig at Intel
P.S. 2 Intel seems to be having another round of crisis this time but it appears to have wisened up in terms of handling the PR. You can read that here:
P.S. 3 Dr. Nicely's original mail can be read here:
