From a partition family to Silicon Valley legend: The Indian engineer who left with US$8
Picture an ordinary day at CompUSA in the early 1990s. A small crowd gathers around two identical-looking computers as a man rings a hand bell, daring shoppers to spot the difference. One machine is running a game or a video clip at a crawl; the other, at speeds that make people audibly gasp.
Before they leave, each shopper is handed a free souvenir, a keychain, its centrepiece a tiny silicon wafer. What almost none of them realise is that the chip dangling from their car keys is a Pentium processor that failed quality control on the factory floor, too flawed to ever power a real computer,
