The processor inside the Nintendo 64 came from MIPS, and so did the one in Sony's first PlayStation. MIPS made no chips of its own. It designed processor cores and licensed them to semiconductor partners such as NEC and Toshiba, which built and sold the silicon. When MIPS went public in June 1998, it was a unit of Silicon Graphics, the workstation maker. SGI sold part of its stake in the offering and kept control of the company.

Out From Silicon Graphics

MIPS Computer Systems was founded in 1984 to build fast, simple RISC processors, a design approach that came out of Stanford research. Silicon Graphics, its biggest customer, bought the company in 1992. MIPS Technologies, incorporated that June, became the processor design arm. The bet was to license designs instead of making chips, collecting fees and royalties from every partner that shipped a MIPS-based product.

Patents Worth More

MIPS priced its offering at $14 a share in June 1998, and Silicon Graphics received the proceeds from the shares it sold. SGI later spun off the rest of its stake. MIPS cores spread into routers, set-top boxes and printers, but ARM won the phone market. In 2013 Imagination Technologies bought MIPS's business, while a group led by ARM bought most of its patents.

Cover: Bosl Anders, Clockmaker at Mora, Anders Zorn. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a clockmaker at his bench (precise little machines).