US Memories Inc may sound like a greeting-card company. In fact, it was the name for a proposed industry-wide joint venture to keep the US in the memory chip business at the end of the 1980s, as the sector reeled from a Japanese corporate onslaught.
US Memories is a forgotten footnote in the technology history books. The attempt at collective action failed when some of the backers got cold feet. Instead, the fight back, when it came, took a far more American form: an entrepreneurial start-up from the unlikely location of Boise, Idaho, called Micron Technology.
Now the US faces another challenge from Asia in the chips that act as one of the most basic components of the digital world. News this month that Tsinghua Unicom, an offshoot of Beijing’s Tsinghua University, has been weighing up an offer for Micron has provoked a predictable ripple of nationalist angst. When kites like this are flown in public, it is often to find out what the reaction to a formal offer would be. On cue, Republican senator John McCain worried publicly about the “potential national security implications” if the US lost a significant position in memory chips. That Tsinghua is a Chinese state-owned company was among the factors weighing on the his mind.