Every Nintendo 64 sold paid a little money to a company that made no chips at all. Rambus, from Mountain View, designed a fast way for processors to talk to memory and licensed the design to the companies that built the parts. When it went public in May 1997, PCs had a problem: processors kept getting faster, and memory could not feed them. Rambus said it had the answer, and it planned to collect rent on it.

A Toll Road for Memory

Mike Farmwald and Mark Horowitz started Rambus in 1990. Their idea was a narrow, high-speed channel between a processor and its memory chips. Rambus decided early to stay out of manufacturing. It licensed the design to memory makers and chip companies and took royalties on what they shipped. That kept the company small and its margins high. It also meant Rambus depended on two things: its patents and the partners who chose its design. Before the IPO, Intel picked Rambus memory for future PCs.

Years in the Courtroom

Rambus priced its IPO at $12 a share in May 1997. Rambus memory shipped in the first Pentium 4 computers, but the industry soon moved to cheaper rival designs. Rambus then spent years in court with memory makers over its patents, and those fights defined the company for a decade. It later added its own chips for server memory modules. Rambus is now based in San Jose and still trades on Nasdaq under RMBS.

Cover: Sign of the Ram, Marcantonio Raimondi. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a ram (Rambus).