Oak Technology

~ the eulogy ~

In 1994 Sun Microsystems had a finished programming language called Oak and no legal way to ship it under that name. The trademark belonged to a chip company in Sunnyvale, so the language became Java instead. Almost everyone who knows that story has never heard of the company that owned the word.

Oak Technology was incorporated in California on 2 July 1987 and reincorporated in Delaware on 8 February 1995, shortly before it started trading on Nasdaq as OAKT. David Tsang built it as a supplier of inexpensive graphics silicon. The OTI-067 and the OTI-087 ended up on budget cards and in the cheap end of the PC market. By 1993 sales had slid to around $30 million and that business was going nowhere in particular.

What rescued it was the compact disc. Oak pioneered the IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM controller in 1993 and was the first to put one on a single chip, which happened to be the exact moment every PC maker decided a CD-ROM drive was standard equipment. Net revenue was $30.1 million in fiscal 1993. Three years later it was $247.98 million. Controllers for optical drives made up a third of the company's revenue in fiscal 1994 and 91 percent of it by fiscal 1996.

That was the top, and the fall took seven years. The chips commoditized and Toshiba developed its own. Revenue was $146.6 million in fiscal 2002, the stock lost more than half its value in a single day on 19 June 2002, and the company spent $38 million on a digital television chip firm called TeraLogic trying to be somewhere else. Fiscal 2003 closed at $106.5 million with a $32.7 million loss, by which point Oak had already signed itself away.

~ the dossier ~

~ why java is not called oak ~

The naming collision is the only thing about Oak Technology that still circulates, and it circulates without the company attached. James Gosling's team at Sun had a language named after a tree outside his window. Legal checked the mark and found a Sunnyvale semiconductor house already sitting on it, so the rename happened in 1994.

It is a small piece of trivia that gets the proportions exactly backwards. In 1994 Oak Technology was the one with the real business, about to grow its revenue nearly sixfold in two years on the back of a plastic disc. The language with no name yet is the one that survived.

~ the chip in the drive ~

The part of Oak that reached ordinary people was not a part at all. It was a file: oakcdrom.sys, the generic ATAPI CD-ROM driver that Microsoft shipped on the Windows 98 startup disk and that sat on every emergency boot floppy anyone made for years afterward. If you ever reinstalled Windows from a floppy and a CD, you loaded Oak Technology's code to make the drive appear.

That was the arrangement in Turkey too, where my own modem was still a 33.6k and the machines in the internet cafes got rebuilt constantly. Nobody said the name out loud. It was a line in config.sys you copied off a printout, and it worked. The company that wrote it was already past its best year by the time I typed it.

~ four one in the afternoon ~

Zoran announced the merger agreement on 5 May 2003 and valued it at $358 million. Oak shareholders got 0.2323 of a Zoran share and $1.78 in cash for each share they held, and a special meeting on 8 August approved it. Zoran's own press release, datelined Santa Clara on 11 August 2003, says the acquisition "will be effective as of 4:01 p.m. eastern time today".

Three days earlier the general counsel had already signed the Form 15 that pulled Oak's registration. It was filed on the 11th, and where the form asks how many holders of record there are, the answer typed in is One. Zoran kept the TeraLogic silicon and went on building digital television chips with it, which is the piece of Oak that had the longest afterlife. The optical storage business did not make it that far. Oak had already divested it during the fiscal year it died in.

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