Intel recalled a major chip in 1995 and turned them into keychains inscribed by the CEO — and the message speaks to Intel's current crisis

pulse

January 5, 2018 9:16 PM

The inscription became a mantra for the company.

Intel recalled the Pentium P5 chip in 1995 that produced errors for certain calculations.
The recalled chips were turned into keychains for Intel employees.
The keychains had an inscription from former Intel CEO Andy Grove that became the company's mantra, and also applies to Intel's current chip crisis.

If Intel has a calendar that counted the time since its last disaster — at least public ones we know about — it would have counted 24 years.

Back in 1994, a bug was discovered in the Pentium P5 family of chips Intel released in 1993 that would cause the chips to incorrectly calculate certain equations. Most users weren't impacted by the bug. But a New York Times Business Day article from 1994 suggested that scientists and engineers who "

"Bad companies are destroyed by crises; good companies survive them; great companies are improved by them."

Indeed, speaking to Tech Radar in back in 2014 – the 20th anniversary of the recall – Intel veteran Tom Waldrop said that the company "

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