BiiN

~ the obit ~

Intel and Siemens began talking about a joint computer company in 1982 and gave the work a code name, Gemini. It stayed a project for six years. The plan was serious and the money was real: a line of fault-tolerant machines with security built into the silicon rather than bolted on in software, aimed at factory automation and at banks, with Intel supplying the processor and Siemens supplying engineers and cash. In July 1988 they finally incorporated it as a 50-50 venture called BiiN, in Hillsboro, Oregon, and started selling.

Fifteen months later it was over. The New York Times reported on 21 October 1989 that Intel and Siemens had ended the venture. On 9 November the trade newsletter Computergram ran the arithmetic of the carve-up under the headline 122 JOB LOSSES FOLLOWING LIQUIDATION OF BiiN: of the company's 300 employees, 165 would be absorbed into other Intel operations and 13 would go to Siemens, "leaving 122 people with no job to go to, according to Reuter".

What they built was an interesting machine and an almost unsellable one. The BiiN 20 was a departmental machine with a single 5.5-MIPS processor and room for fifty terminals, priced somewhere between $43,000 and $80,000. The BiiN 60 took up to eight processors and a thousand terminals and ran from $345,000 to $815,000. BiiN/OS was Unix-compatible and written largely in Ada, around two million lines of it. The hardware enforced a capability-based object model, meaning the processor itself checked whether a piece of code was permitted to touch a piece of memory, which is an idea the industry has spent the last decade rediscovering.

I was five years old in October 1989 and this was not a product that any individual could have bought anyway. It is in this cemetery because the ending is so clean: two of the largest electronics companies in the world arrived at the same conclusion at the same time, that the thing they had been building since 1982 was never going to pay for itself.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the joke ~

Inside Intel the acronym got rewritten as Billions Invested in Nothing. It is the line every retelling of BiiN reaches for and it has no attributable origin, which is worth saying plainly: nobody has ever identified who said it first. Avram Miller, who negotiated the venture on Intel's side, repeats it in his own memoir and calls it not exactly true.

Not exactly true, because the spend was hundreds of millions rather than billions, and the figures do not agree with each other. Wikipedia says about $300 million with no source attached. Ken Shirriff's detailed history of the i960 puts it at 1,700 person-years and $430 million. Nobody has published a reconciled number, which is itself a fact about how quietly this was wound up.

~ what the money actually bought ~

The processor. BiiN's machines ran on the Intel 80960, designed for the venture, and when the venture collapsed Intel kept the silicon and Siemens kept the software. Intel then stripped the elaborate capability and tagged-memory machinery out of the design, leaving a clean 32-bit RISC core, and sold that as the i960 into embedded systems, where it ended up inside laser printers and disk array controllers. Hughes Aircraft licensed the design for work on the Advanced Tactical Fighter program.

For most of the 1990s the i960 was one of the highest-volume 32-bit embedded processors in the world. It paid Intel back for a computer company that had closed before most people heard its name, which is the only sense in which Billions Invested in Nothing is wrong.

~ the two dates ~

English Wikipedia files BiiN under companies disestablished in 1990 and its own article says the company closed in October 1989 and folded in April 1990. The April date carries no citation and no other source repeats it, so this grave is dated to the October announcement and the November liquidation, both of which have contemporaneous reporting behind them. If there was a formal dissolution filing in 1990, nobody has produced it.

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