Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!pepper!cmcmanis
From: cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Japan and semiconductors
Message-ID: <37906@sun.uucp>
Date: 5 Jan 88 20:21:02 GMT
References: <2244@crash.cts.com> <4895@well.UUCP> <683@astroatc.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis)
Followup-To: ca.politics
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 37

Quoting someone else :
>>         Is this a good thing?   If the Japanese are successful in driving
>>      our chip industry under because of the concentration of capital that
>>      their society allows, we will all be in trouble!

Then in article <683@astroatc.UUCP> (Jon Wesener) writes:
|>Don't forget that Japan also doesn't have to spend a lot of money on their
|>military.  We pump billions into SDI R&D and the military which will have
|>little to no results usable by the private sector.  An issue of PC-World
|>around October has an excellent editorial on why the US is losing ground
|>in semi-conductor technology to the Japanese for these very reasons...

Well, my feeling is that if you haven't worked for a semiconductor 
manufacturer you can't really understand the issues that led up to the 
sanctions or the benefits/costs that they incurred. I worked for Intel
at the time most of this stuff was going down, and the big problem was
EPROMs not DRAMs, but that's a different story. I do know that Intel had
a working CMOS 1 Mbit DRAM before most, if not all, of the Japanese did, and 
didn't market it simply because they knew the japanese would underprice
them before they had make back their investment. They solved their problem
fairly ingeniously but that is probably still covered under something I 
signed when I left. Anyway...

The Jan 29th Wall Street Journal shows Japan has increased it's support of
our military to 30 billion a year, and is considering upping the ante 
further. Which is good and bad, because when you pay for something you 
start thinking you own it, and that is something we definitely don't 
want. Japan could *easily* be a superpower in the world today and if
they decided they no longer wanted to support the American consumer
an embargo from them would hit a whole hell of a lot harder than one
from the arabs did. Anyway, we are off the subject. That's why this and
it's follow ups are being sent to ca.politics.


--Chuck McManis
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis   BIX: cmcmanis  ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.