But then some muckety-mucks had a meeting and made a decision that any software running on the Falcon had to be able to run on old Omega computers as well - computers that didn't use parallel processing. They installed a new software upgrade, but it didn't support parallel processing. What did all this mean? For most of those two million customers, one of the two chips was being wasted! Literally, it never even felt an electrical signal. It waited, dormant as a bear in hibernation. Yet people had paid for them. People were being ripped off, and they had no idea. As far as they knew, they had bought the top of the line. Their Falcons were still fast, since even that one active 486 chip was faster than the previous design. There were also numerous other advancements in the Falcon that kept customers happy: the motherboard circuitry was far more efficient, and little memory closets, called caches, were used on every card and chip. But the net result was that the standard Falcon sold by Omega was only a little more than half as fast as Francis had designed it. Half as fast. Imagine buying a new Porsche and finding out it only goes forty miles per hour! The real tragedy was this same dynamic was true for most of Omega's competitors. They were selling computers with chips inside that weren't being fully utilized. They were all afraid to sell software that wouldn't run on older machines. It was a marketing decision - and that said it all. These were marketing companies now, not really computer companies. Years ago, in the seventies and even through the mid-eighties, the chip companies actually built their own chips in their own labs, and software companies wrote their own software, et cetera. But in the nineties, much of what the public thought of as computer companies were just shell companies with dominant sales forces and advertising budgets. Most of their CEOs were middle-aged guys with MBAs and a few years under their belt building toothpaste market share for Procter &. Gamble. They grew by acquiring outright all the shares of new start-ups. They paid others to design the heavy iron.

Then they had dumbed down his chip.

The ultimate indignity.