Crazy Fish May Redefine Computer Industry

"I remember being tired and sleepy and hurting," Fish says, "but after noon I wasn't feeling anything but my ribs." He screamed in pain when the canopy opened and again when he landed.

"I wanted to get to the 24 hours," Fish says. Only four men had ever lasted that long. After jump No. 255, the clock ran out.

In a phenomenal performance of will and guts, Fish and Stearns had averaged 10.6 jumps per hour or one every 5 minutes and 39 seconds. Their fastest cycle: 3 minutes and 28 seconds.

Though Fish thought only jumpers cared about the record, the story of Stearns' and Fish's grueling accomplishment appeared in newspapers around the world.

For a while, Fish was a celebrity on drop zones. But in the last agonizing hours of the Air-Enduro he remembers falling and spinning and thinking, "You probably should slow down a bit. Find a nice girl. Have a family."

The experience forced him to face another reality. The fax machine had killed his electronic mail company, Post Technologies. Fish had to fire everyone, sell off his inventory and find a buyer for the building.

"It was absolutely crushing," Fish says, calling it one of the lowest points of his life. A friend lost $50,000 he'd invested in Post. "You've failed yourself, your shareholders and your employees. And you're wrong. Who wants to use electronic mail?"

"This may be a significant filing," the lawyer told Fish when he handed him the patent document. It was 1989, and Fish and co-inventor Chuck Moore had invented a new microchip they called Sh-Boom. "Have you got anything else?" the patent lawyer asked.

"Well, I have this screwy idea about this clock," Fish said. He didn't mean one on the wall.

Back in Silicon Valley, Fish was floundering when he ran into Moore—"a computing-world rock god"—at a bar called Sh-Boom in Sunnyvale. Creator of the FORTH computer language and architect of two microprocessors, Moore also was at loose ends. They began collaborating.

By July 1989, working with Oki Electric, a Japanese company, they had created the architecture and logic design of Sh-Boom; at 60 megahertz it would be three times as fast as other microprocessors.

But at "lay out," where the transistors are drawn the way they will be on the silicon, a computerized simulation revealed their microprocessor didn't work because the internal clock, an electronic tick that tells the circuits when to do what, failed.

Using an idea out of left field, Fish designed a high-speed on-chip clock. "My design synchronizes the clock with the performance of the transistors that make up the rest of the circuit." Fish says. "The Oki guys said this is ridiculous and we can't even simulate it." Fish's clock was set aside. A slower-speed Sh-Boom chip went into production with a clock designed by his partner Moore.

Fish drafted a patent and the drawings for the Sh-Boom chip and a dozen other ideas, some Moore had come up with, some Fish had created.

"I was pretty sure that the inventions I'd come up with would work," Fish says, "but everybody was saying they were bullshit. Everybody."

When the patent lawyer asked if he had anything else, Fish explained his clock idea. "That's significant," the lawyer said. "Go draw it."

The next day Fish handed him a yellow pad and the clock patent was filed at the last moment. On all the documents Fish included Moore's name.

Then the manufacturer in Japan reported that Sh-Boom didn't work. When a programmer who had been hired to design a printer using Sh-Boom called to congratulate him, Fish knew something was fishy. He tells a tale of theft and corporate espionage involving a Japanese businessman, Fish and a high-ranking U.S. trade representative. But he got back the designs, prototypes and parts in an unmarked box mailed from Japan.

Fish and Moore went their separate ways and each started trying to license the chip.

"That was about the time Intel was beginning to sweep everybody else away, and if it didn't run Intel instructions," Fish says, "it didn't matter."

Alliance Semiconductor licensed Sh-Boom and went "balls to the wall" to produce the microprocessors only to have the memory chip market swing the other way. Alliance filed for bankruptcy. "All of a sudden my meal ticket was gone," Fish says.

One Sunday in mid-1992, Fish was at home when a man knocked on the door of his barely furnished apartment in Mountainview, California. He opened it to find a middle-aged man who looked like an Italian gigolo: salt-and-pepper hair, white silk shirt, green leather pants and a gold chain. Introducing himself as Helmut Falk from Romania, the man said, "I vant to buy your microprocessor."

It turned out that Falk was a wealthy entrepreneur. In 1992, they worked out a deal for his company, Nanotronics, to license the Sh-Boom chip for up to $10 million in royalties.

On top of the world, Fish suddenly "retired" and moved back to Texas.