“David Cassel, who was at the unveiling, sent in his notes
and some great quotes from the unveiling….“
“Transmeta had packed the press into an auditorium known as the
“carriage house” — I saw a dozen TV cameras, and I’d guess 150
reporters. A big screen filled part of the wall by the stage,
flashing a fast montage of pictures (circuit boards, people’s
faces) over cheesy jazz music. But when Transmeta CEO David Ditzel
took the stage at 9:05, there was a dead silence. “I know some of
you have been waiting a while to hear about what we’ve been doing,”
he said to play up the tension, prompting a few laughs. “Some of
you have been waiting four and a half years…”
“Ditzel ran through his Power Point Presentation. (1995.
“Something was fundamentally wrong with processors…”) and pointed
out that the people looking for solutions had been the entrenched
semi-conductor companies. Then he announced, of course, Transmeta’s
“combined hardware/software solution…. The first microprocessor
re-thought explicitly for the problems of mobile computing.” By now
everyone knows that it retains x86 compatibility while allowing a a
completely new chip architecture. Ditzel remembered that when he
was recruiting for Transmeta, after sharing his plans he’d hear “If
you start this company, I’ll quit my job and come join you to do
this.”