The Pentium chip was the new flagship product, the speedster that would let PCs impinge on minicomputer territory. But that wasn’t all. Intel envisioned the Pentium as the perfect chip for computers aimed at the home market. No longer would Mom, Pop, and The Kids poke along with computers weaker than those at the office. Thanks to Intel, they would enjoy glitzy cartoons, educational programs, and other multimedia offerings in full glory on their machines at home. Intel launched a major TV campaign and persuaded scores of computer makers to adorn their boxes and ads with “Intel Inside” stickers. Intel was looking ahead to millions of dollars of Christmas-related sales. At the time, I suspect, the Internet didn’t figure that prominently in Intel’s plans. Its Net area was hardly as dazzling or as ambitious as those of many other companies. That would change. The trouble started when a mathematics professor in Virginia found that under certain conditions, the Pentium chip would make mistakes in arithmetic. There at Lynchburg College, Dr. Thomas Nicely couldn’t believe his screen. To his amazement, he was able to verify that the chip, not the human, was at fault here. In October 1994 the professor’s “Bug in the Pentium” memo went out over the Internet. It circulated rapidly from mailing list to mailing list, from newsgroup to newsgroup, as well as on commercial nets such as CompuServe and Prodigy. Pentium-hostile messages flew back and forth between scientists, corporate executives, consultants, and other influential people, who, thanks to the Internet, could share complaints more efficiently than ever. Intel tried some damage control via the Net and in press statements. The heat reached the point where the head of Intel asked a underling to issue an apology and a technical explanation. The message betrayed corporate panic, pure and simple. “I am posting from my home system,” Richard Wirt, Director of Software Technology, prefaced a weekend note. And then came an “I am truly sorry” message from Andy Grove, President of Intel. In various statements Intel assured customers that the average computer user would typically run across the problem once every 27,000 years. The official line was that nontechnical people needn’t worry. Intel announced it would replace chips _if_ people could show that the defect could harm their work. That still didn’t placate the Net and the media. Netwise reporters at papers such as the _Washington Post_ and _New York Times_ and at _Newsday_ warned the thousands of Christmas shoppers who were about to buy $2,000 Pentium machines. Billions of dollars were at stake here. Computer makers had already moved millions of Pentium machines, and IBM came out with a statement saying that it would replace defective chips—even though Intel kept claiming that the nontechnical need not worry. It didn’t help when shoppers learned that Intel knew about the Pentium’s defects as early as June.