Location: Main Amphitheater, McCormick Place, Chicago, Illinois
Date: Monday, April 16, 1990, 9:00 a.m.
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte)
On April 16, 1990, at nine o'clock sharp, the main amphitheater at McCormick Place plunged into darkness. The hubbub of three thousand journalists, financial analysts, and IT resellers died down instantly.
Triumphant electronic music, heavy with bass, made the walls of the hall vibrate. On the giant screen that covered the entire back wall, a huge electric blue logo appeared, cutting through the darkness like a laser: INTEL i486.
A beam of white light swept across the stage, stopping at a man in an impeccable suit, with a hard face and a predatory look. Andrew Grove, Intel's legendary CEO, walked up to the lectern to thunderous applause. Sitting in the front row, Bill Gates, the young Microsoft prodigy, watched him with a knowing smile, waiting his turn to present Windows 3.0. The two emperors of Silicon Valley were savoring their coronation.
At the far end of the room, drowned in the shadow of a back door, Lazare Bonaparte stood with his arms crossed. With his dark sweater and anonymous technician badge, he was perfectly invisible.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Andy Grove began, his voice echoing through the loudspeakers with martial authority. "Computing in the 80s was in its infancy. Today, I welcome you to adulthood. I present to you the beating heart of the new decade."
The giant screen behind him came to life, revealing a three-dimensional model of a silicon chip.
"The Intel 486 is not just an evolution, it's a mathematical revolution," Grove said fervently. "We integrated the mathematical coprocessor directly onto the chip. We have exceeded one million transistors. But above all... we have rethought the very way the machine processes information."
Lazare watched the screen with the attention of a sniper gauging his target. He knew the 486. In his memories of the future, this chip was a major evolution of the 386—a classic, robust x86 architecture with an 8 KB first-level cache and a simple scalar pipeline.
But as Grove's presentation progressed and the schematics of the internal architecture were displayed on the giant screen, Lazare frowned slightly.
The former agent of the Action Service straightened up. His eyes narrowed.
"Look at our new execution pipeline," the Intel CEO announced, pointing to a complex diagram with a laser pen. "Our engineers have achieved a tour de force. We have integrated a hardware decoder capable of translating our complex instructions (CISC) into ultra-fast micro-operations, inspired by RISC architectures, to feed our execution unit without any bottlenecks. We have also integrated a primitive branching prediction mechanism!"
In the shadows, Lazare's heart missed a beat—not out of surprise, but of pure tactical understanding.
It's impossible, the Builder calculated coldly. The original 486 did not have this hybrid decoding logic. This technique should not have appeared at Intel until the Pentium Pro, in 1995.
The specifications displayed on the screen—aggressive cache management, micro-operation processing, registry optimization—did not match the original time frame. The chip presented by Andy Grove was a mutant. It was on steroids. It was at least forty percent more powerful than the 486 that Lazare remembered.
The explanation struck Lazare like a bolt of lightning.
Dakar.
The previous year, the CIA and NSA had launched a military commando raid on Volta's servers in Senegal. Lazare had believed, at the time, that the scrambling of data and the destruction of the hard drives had been enough to protect the secrets of the VESLA processor.
He was mistaken. The Americans had stumbled upon fragments of encrypted code and partial logic schemes. And rather than give up, Intel had put its best minds on the case. With the Pentagon's unlimited budget, they had managed to decipher pieces of French architecture. Unable to copy the entire chip, they had ripped out concepts from Volta's RISC—like a surgeon harvesting organs from an enemy—and forcibly grafted them onto their old x86 architecture.
Andy Grove had cheated. To survive the threat posed by Volta, the American giant had resorted to industrial plunder.
"With this hybrid architecture, the Intel 486 shatters all industry records!" Grove yelled into his microphone, galvanizing the crowd. "We offer processing power that makes any other technology obsolete! And together with our partner Microsoft, we guarantee that your software will run faster than ever."
The room exploded in applause. The photographers' flashes crackled, flooding the stage with white bursts of light. Andy Grove raised his arms to the sky, intoxicated by his triumph.
But in the half-light at the back of the room, a chilling smile, devoid of all joy, stretched Lazare Bonaparte's lips.
He had just understood that Silicon Valley was terrified. Intel, the absolute master of the technological world, had lowered itself to playing the role of scavenger to improve its product. It was a flagrant admission of inferiority.
Worse still, in their arrogance, they thought that this partial theft would be enough to save them. The hybrid chip that Grove presented was certainly remarkable for 1990, but it was still a scalar processor, strangled by its own physical limitations. It was a tricycle onto which a racing engine had been grafted.
A few hundred meters away, in the Palmer Lounge, lay the V-1000. A thoroughbred superscalar processor, capable of executing three instructions per clock cycle. A fighter jet.
Lazare looked at his watch. It was nine-thirteen.
Bill Gates stood up from his front-row seat, buttoning his jacket, ready to take the stage to relieve Andy Grove and present the future of operating systems.
Time is up, the Builder thought, slipping his hands into the pockets of his sweater. The time for judgment has come.
PART 2: Black Magic
Location: Main Amphitheater then Palmer Room, McCormick Place, Chicago
Date: Monday, April 16, 1990, 9:15 a.m.
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte)
Andy Grove withdrew from the lectern to another round of applause, his forehead beading with sweat but his chest bulging with the certainty of having saved his empire. He held out his hand to Bill Gates.
The young founder of Microsoft, his glasses fitted to his nose and sporting his eternal top-of-the-class smile, grabbed the microphone.
In the shadow of the back door, Lazare Bonaparte felt neither anger nor concern at the technological theft of which Volta had been the victim. On the contrary, a deep and icy satisfaction invaded him. Intel had cheated by grafting concepts of the French processor onto their old 486. They had boosted their engines. But a tricycle, even one with a racing engine, always ends up breaking apart if it tries to race a fighter jet.
The V-1000 was not a hybridization cobbled together in a hurry. It was a pure superscalar RISC architecture, designed from the first transistor to execute three instructions per cycle.
On stage, Bill Gates clicked a remote control. The giant screen replaced Intel's chip modeling with a colorful logo of a stylized window.
"The hardware is nothing without the software," Gates began in his slightly nasal voice. "Today, Microsoft is proud to introduce you to the future of UI. No more stark command lines. No more memory limitations. Let me introduce you to Windows 3.0."
A screenshot appeared. It displayed sixteen colors, crude icons, and an interface that painstakingly tried to simulate multitasking on top of the old MS-DOS foundation.
Lazare looked at his watch. Fourteen minutes past nine.
"Thanks to the protected mode of Intel's 486," Gates continued, "Windows 3.0 will allow you to open a word processor and a spreadsheet at the same time, with a fluid..."
He would never finish his sentence.
At nine-fifteen sharp, a shrill and piercing sound resonated in the front rows of the amphitheater.
Beep-Beep.
Bill Gates paused, frowning.
Then a second beep sounded. Then a third. In the space of five seconds, it was a real cacophony. Dozens, then hundreds, of pagers—the famous Motorola pagers clipped to the belts of journalists, analysts, and editors—began to ring and vibrate simultaneously across the huge room.
The hubbub instantly overtook the voice of the Microsoft founder. The journalists looked down at the small liquid crystal screens of their devices.
The message, disseminated en masse by the AMD and Compaq marketing teams via the telecommunications networks of Illinois, was short—within the strict limits of the authorized characters—but of an unprecedented violence:
COMPAQ VOLTA V-1. RISC 32-BIT. 10X 486. VOLTAOS. $2499. PALMER LOUNGE. NOW.
In the aisles, the incomprehension lasted about three seconds. Then, the shock of the confirmed rumor struck the room like lightning.
10 times the 486. $2499. The BBS leak from the night before was not a hoax. It was real. And it was just across the main hall, right now.
The editor-in-chief of PC Magazine, sitting in the second row, was the first to react. He jumped up, flipped his chair backward with a metallic crash, grabbed his briefcase, and literally ran down the aisle, jostling his colleagues.
That was the signal. The dam gave way.
Lazare Bonaparte, frozen in the shadows, witnessed one of the most surreal and cruel scenes in the history of modern capitalism. Three thousand people stood up as one man. The sound of chairs tipping over and hurried footsteps on the thick carpet completely drowned out the amphitheater's sound system.
It was an exodus. A panic of gold seekers fearing that they would arrive too late at the vein of the century.
On stage, Bill Gates stepped back, arms dangling, his face pale, watching his audience turn their backs on him. The Windows 3.0 interface still shone, unnecessarily, on the giant screen. Andy Grove jumped out of his chair and rushed to the lectern, snatching the microphone from Gates' hands.
"Ladies and gentlemen!" shouted the big boss of Intel, his voice trembling with rage and terror. "The presentation is not over! I ask you to sit down again!"
But no one listened to the fallen king. The room was emptying at a terrifying speed. Journalists crowded toward the double doors, pushing each other to get out as quickly as possible, guided by the call of history that was being written in the Palmer Lounge.
Lazare stepped aside to let the human stream pass. The air, saturated with adrenaline, reeked of sweat and leather. The Builder took one last look at the scene. Andy Grove, his fist clenched on the lectern, his face flushed, looked out at the now-deserted amphitheater, populated only by a few stunned Intel employees. His empire had been pulverized in less than a minute, without a single shot being fired.
Lazare smiled in the darkness, turned away, and followed the human tide.
When he arrived at the entrance of the Palmer Lounge, the crowd overflowed into the hallway. The photographers' flashes crackled through the open doors like an electrical storm.
Lazare managed to make his way along the side wall, sneaking with the agility of a ghost until he had a clear view of the small platform.
Eckhard Pfeiffer, the colossus of Compaq, radiated an imperial presence. He was not wearing a suit, but a simple white shirt rolled up at the elbows. At his side was the Compaq Volta V-1.
The tower, in absolute matte black, with predatory lines, seemed to absorb the light of the spotlights. And on its side, the silver holographic lightning bolt Powered by Volta shone like a seal of sovereignty.
The screen connected to the machine did not show a static presentation in sixteen colors. It displayed VoltaOS 2.0. It was a masterpiece of fluidity. The demonstration assistant manipulated the mouse with dizzying speed. The audience held its breath.
They saw translucent windows sliding over the desktop without the slightest jerk. They saw a 3D wireframe model running in real time in one corner of the screen, while a massive spreadsheet was instantly recalculated in another window, all accompanied by the playback of a digital audio file without the slightest interruption.
It wasn't computing. For the audience of 1990, it was black magic.
"You just attended the presentation of the 486 and Windows 3.0," Pfeiffer said, his voice echoing in the religious silence of the room. "Remarkable technology... for the previous decade."
A shiver ran through the assembly.
"At Compaq, in alliance with Advanced Micro Devices and our mysterious European partners at Volta, we refused to compromise. What you see spinning before your eyes is not an engineering concept. It is not a military prototype. It is the most powerful desktop computer in human history. And it is available."
Pfeiffer stepped to the edge of the platform.
"As I speak, tens of thousands of units are waiting in the reserves of all the major distributors in the country. You can walk out of this convention center, walk into a store, and leave with the future under your arm. For the price of two thousand four hundred and ninety-nine dollars. The monopoly is broken. The Volta era begins today."
The room exploded. It wasn't polite, thunderous applause like at Intel. It was a roar. Reporters rushed to the stage, shouting their questions. Jerry Sanders, standing backstage, was almost crying with joy. America had just capitulated to the evidence of absolute power.
Leaning against the back wall, Lazare Bonaparte observed the triumph of his creation. The Trojan Horse had passed through the gates of the fortress. American industry was going to abandon Intel to drink from the source of pure speed.
Auguste Bonaparte, who had managed to make his way to his adopted son, placed a hand trembling with emotion on Lazare's shoulder.
"It is done," murmured the former diplomat, his eyes shining. "We have brought America to its knees. It's a total victory. You have the right to smile, Lazare."
But the Builder was no longer smiling. The adrenaline of revenge had already dissipated, replaced by the tyranny of time.
He took his eyes off the delirious crowd and turned to Auguste.
"This is only the first step, father," he replied in a low voice, which only Auguste could hear in the midst of the din. "Intel has just proven that they can decode our architecture. They're going to panic, they're going to bleed money, but they're going to fight back."
Lazare tightened his jacket. In his mind, the COMDEX of 1990 was already a thing of the past. Schematics of the upcoming VESLA-III processor—with its monstrous Out-of-Order architecture and "Internet-Ready" network controller due next year—burned in his retinas. And then there was the SONG-III: the GPU that would soon bring to life three-dimensional worlds that the market couldn't even imagine yet.
"Prepare the flight back to Paris," ordered the ogre from Ivry as he headed for the exit door. "Playtime is over. It's time to go back to the Bunker."