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1. Preface There are by now no sentences left with which to make a dramatic introduction to a paper on microprocessors. The very best sentences have long since become part of common parlance, and most of those were never true anyway. The real facts about microprocessors are increasingly mundane and certainly socially depressing: as things stand right now it is quite uncertain that Britain will be a richer, more contented land by the year 2,000. There is no point in pretending that everything is fine. Most things are fairly bad: the rate at which British industry is making any attempt to come to terms with the microprocessor; the rate at which microprocessor engineers are being produced; the relatively low status afforded to anything practical; the evidence to date of union attitudes towards technology‐originated redundancies; all of these are cause for concern. We are in the middle of something qualitatively different from the last 50 years of industrial change, and the social implications are more than most will admit to. Employment will drop. To believe that workers replaced by microprocessor systems will inevitably find jobs in the construction of those same microprocessor systems is as foolish as thinking that horses replaced by motor cars could find jobs in the various branches of the auto industry.

A package performance bottleneck is developing because of the inability to densely wire single chip modules together on the printed wiring board. An array processor, constructed by means of various high performance packaging techniques, demonstrates that multichip modules of even modest size can give dramatic improvements in the packaging figure of merit.

The first paper ever published on microprocessors described the device as the “re‐configurable” circuit. This conveys the simplest, but most important feature of the microprocessor, namely that by changing the software a device can be tailored to fit a wide range of applications — from a simple light switch control to the central processing unit of a computer. This versatility of microelectronic devices, combined with their falling price, decreasing size and exponentially increasing power makes inevitable their widespread application. Indeed, it can be predicted with reasonable confidence that by the end of the century the pervasiveness of the “silicon chip” will be the defining characteristic of an advanced society.

Publishing has been defined as a way to make information widely available to the public. Our formerly mechanical world required many preliminary actions, such a typesetting and proofing, which became associated with the meaning of publishing. Electronic publishing makes is possible to make anything available to the world instantly with no preliminary preparation. Under these circumstances, materials can be divided between text posted to the Internet and works published with preliminary preparation. The local loop of the telephone line defines the speed of the Internet for most people. The local loop has lacked the speed to make flipping through pages in books or full motion video available over the Internet. Storage systems for electronic documents have defined large‐scale document storage and video storage as too slow, too unreliable, and too expensive to be consistent with the free paradigm of the Internet. The demands for processing power by electronic gaming are opening the way to publish interactive simulations as a means of expression. Increases in speed, capacity, and processing power will add new document types to the meaning of electronic publishing.

A few suppliers to manufacturers are now working to build brand preference or consumer franchise. Discusses the success of NutraSweet in obtaining long‐term supply contracts, despite patent expiration; it can be attributed to building such consumer franchise successfully through an ingredient branding strategy that included both their original equipment manufacturers′ customers and the end consumer. To be successful, such a branding effort requires a multifaceted strategy, one which must include collaboration with manufacturers as well as direct consumer promotion. Emphasizes this point with an analysis of the current “Intel Inside” campaign, an ingredient branding strategy being employed by the Intel Corporation, a supplier of microprocessor chips to the personal computer industry. Intel′s efforts represent a particularly demanding test of ingredient branding because both the PC industry and those which supply it are both technology‐driven and extremely price competitive. Despite these obstacles, Intel appears to be making its investment work.