Venue: Salle Pleyel, 252 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris.
Date: May 1, 1996, 10:00 AM.
Point of view: Omniscient (Sliding focus on the audience and the twins on stage).
The Salle Pleyel buzzed with electric tension, a feverish hum generated by more than 2,500 journalists, financial analysts, and engineers from around the world. In the aisles, press officers from Silicon Valley, secretly dispatched by Intel, Microsoft, and Silicon Graphics, whispered into their bulky cell phones.
The previous year, the 1995 Lúmen keynote had left a feeling of incompleteness. Lazare Bonaparte had merely delivered a routine update: simple increases in the clock speed of the VESLA processors , without any major software announcements.
The American press had then run headlines about « the Ogre running out of steam, » convinced that the French miracle of Volta SA had reached its technological ceiling.
But on May 1st, 1996, the atmosphere was different. Heavy. Laden with the promise of a cataclysm.
When the lights in the hall abruptly went out, silence fell like a guillotine. On the immense panoramic screen, the «V» logo lit up in pure white. Yet, it was not the tall figure of Lazare Bonaparte in a dark suit that stepped into the halo of the central projector.
Two seventeen-year-old teenagers, dressed with clinical sobriety, took possession of the platform. Minh and Linh Bonaparte. The heirs.
A murmur of disbelief rippled through the rows of red velvet. The Builder's absence was an unthinkable anomaly. But the twins' icy confidence quickly silenced the whispers.
They weren't there to be mere window dressing; they exuded the authority of those who had forged the metal themselves.
Linh was the first to speak. Her voice, clear and devoid of any emotional dross, resonated in the perfect acoustics of the auditorium.
« Last year, we sold you megahertz, » the young woman began. « We strengthened the muscles of your machines. But muscles without a nervous system capable of harnessing them are nothing but a sterile force.
Today, Volta is no longer simply accelerating what already exists. We are changing the paradigm. »
The giant screen behind her displayed a huge cobalt blue logo: VoltaOS X 3.4 .
« I'd like to introduce you to the cornerstone of our ecosystem, » Linh continued, stepping over to the demonstration terminal. « Until this morning, operating systems, whether from Redmond or our own labs, considered displaying information a chore.
Displaying a window, moving a cursor, or layering menus required thousands of interrupt cycles from the central processing unit. The graphical user interface was the bane of computing. »
She slid her hand over the mouse. The vOS X 3.4 interface appeared on the fifteen-meter-wide screen. It was an aesthetic shock.
« VoltaOS X 3.4 is the world's first operating system with a fully hardware-accelerated user interface, Linh announced. We have natively integrated our new graphics library, the B3D API 2.0 . »
She clicked on an application window and quickly moved it across the screen. The window didn't just slide; it cast a dynamic shadow on the background, its edges had a slight motion blur, and when she superimposed a second one, the glass of the top window allowed the text of the one below to show through with crystal clarity.
Alpha blending, transparency, real-time font smoothing... All of this no longer costs your VESLA processor a single clock cycle . The operating system communicates directly, without going through the cumbersome security kernel, with the true brain of this revolution.
Linh turned to his brother. The room held its breath. The Microsoft software engineers in the third row realized they had just fallen five years behind in a matter of seconds thanks to a simple windowing demonstration.
Minh stepped forward into the light, holding in his palm an imposing black printed circuit board, dominated by a grooved aluminum heat sink. «To power this nervous system, we needed to design a heart of unprecedented intensity,» declared the young hardware architect. «This is the Volta VRX-150 . The first unified graphics processor in history.» The screen displayed an exploded view of silicon.
« This isn't just a simple video card. This component has a hardware geometry engine. It integrates 3.8 million transistors dedicated exclusively to calculating space, light, and textures.
It processes matrices, calculates light paths, and outputs 300 million pixels per second. »
Photographers' flashes popped frantically. But in the front row, a specialist technical journalist raised his hand, breaking protocol.
« That's fascinating, Mr. Bonaparte! » cried the reporter. « But how do you intend to connect this monster?
Our millions of Compaq AXIOMs are equipped with Socket V and a BBI bus designed for network expansion or memory, not to handle graphics bandwidth of this magnitude! There's no dedicated port on your motherboards!
Are you going to force all of Europe to buy a whole new desktop computer to use it? »
A deathly silence fell over Pleyel. This was the flaw. The logistical bottleneck that all the competitors had secretly hoped for.
Minh was not fazed. A smile, a direct legacy of Lazare's icy arrogance, stretched across his lips.
« That's an excellent question, » Minh replied, placing the solid graphics card on the desk. At Wintel, the answer would have been a resounding « yes. »
They would have explained with a professional smile that progress requires sacrifices. They would have declared your motherboard obsolete and forced you to spend a thousand euros to buy a new architecture.
Minh leaned forward, fixing his gaze on the journalist's.
« But we are Volta. We promised our customers that the AXIOM chassis was a sanctuary for future upgrades. We refuse to change the core architecture of our motherboards today because we are reserving that complete overhaul for our next major iteration, the upcoming VESLA IV generation .
The motherboard you have in your living room, which you bought a year or two ago, should be used to its fullest potential. »
The teenager took out of his pocket a rectangular component about ten centimeters long, equipped with a male connector on one side and a wide female slot on the other. A processing chip sat in its center.
Volta-Bridge Active Bridge Adapter .
The wiring diagram appeared on the giant screen, detailed with ruthless pedagogical clarity.
« This component isn't just a piece of plastic, » the architect explained. « It's a smart riser . You plug it directly into the primary BBI expansion port on your existing motherboard.
Then you connect the VRX-150 graphics card to the top of this adapter. What does it do? It intercepts the graphics instructions sent by the B3D 2.0 API and acts as an ultra-high-frequency traffic controller.
It repackages the data on the fly to intelligently saturate the bandwidth of our legacy BBI bus without causing congestion. »
Minh paused, letting the murmurs of astonishment swell in the room. The solution was an absolute feat of engineering elegance, transforming a general-purpose data bus into a graphics superhighway.
« I want to be completely technically honest with you, » Minh continued, his tone deepening, establishing a formidable rapport with his audience. « Going through this adapter creates friction.
An electronic bottleneck. The bridge consumes transfer cycles. By using this adapter instead of a hypothetical port soldered directly onto the motherboard, the VRX-150 card loses, on average, 8% of its theoretical power. »
Wall Street analysts scribbled frantically in their notebooks. Eight percent loss. On paper, it was a weakness.
But Minh raised his hand, brushing aside the virtual objection with a contemptuous wave of his hand. «Eight percent. Let me put that number into perspective,» the teenager asserted.
He turned towards the screen. A comparative table of raw geometric computing power appeared, showing no mercy to the competition.
« An SGI professional workstation, the absolute reference in the American film industry, sold for nearly fifty thousand euros, displays a fill rate of 25 million pixels per second and struggles to calculate 300,000 triangles per second. »
The SGI gauge appeared, tiny.
VRX-150 card , with its 8% loss due to our adapter, plugged into a student's living room or an architect's office on a basic computer costing less than 400 Euros...
Volta's blue gauge literally burst through the ceiling of the graph projected onto the screen.
« ...delivers an effective fill rate of 276 million pixels per second and blasts geometry with 7.3 million transformed and illuminated triangles per second . »
The silence in the room was deafening. The sheer force of the figures had just shattered all doubts.
« Well, yes, » Minh conceded with a cold smile. « We lose 8%.
But when your computing power is twenty-five times greater than that of the world leader in the professional market, the 8% loss is no longer an engineering constraint. It's simply an accounting anecdote.
The adapter guarantees you the power of a Hollywood supercomputer without requiring you to unscrew a single screw on your current motherboard. »
The Salle Pleyel erupted. Engineers, video game developers, and professionals from around the world rose to their feet, applauding wildly the audacity of a solution that saved their wallets while shattering the limits of real-time rendering.
The hardware obstacle had just been transformed into a triumph of customer loyalty.
In the shadows of the wings, Lazare Bonaparte folded his arms. His twins had just passed the entrance test into the inner circle of industrial lords. They had tamed the crowd.
They had imposed the philosophy of the Empire.
But Lazarus knew that technology alone wasn't enough to subjugate a market. Silicon had to be accompanied by the sharpest weapon in Volta's arsenal: a pricing policy of absolute cruelty. The financial guillotine.
Calm gradually returned to the room as Minh raised a soothing hand. The giant screen switched to the next screen, abandoning the 3D models and returning to the simple typography of silicon. «The VRX-150 will handle the lighting,» the young architect announced. «But we haven't forgotten the core of your machines.
The logical heart that runs our factories, your servers, and the latest update to our operating system.» The image of the golden chip appeared in macro, the imposing Integrated Heat Spreader in nickel-plated copper shining under the virtual spotlights.
« I present to you the Empire's new generation of computing units: the VESLA 2390 processor . »
Minh quickly detailed the architecture. A refined 0.35 micron etching, a controlled thermal envelope, a doubled cache memory.
« The native clock speed of this processor shatters the glass ceiling of consumer microcomputing, » Minh solemnly declared. « The VESLA 2390 is clocked at 275 MHz .
It's the fastest civilian processor ever built on the face of this planet. And, true to our promise, it fits into Socket V on your current motherboard. You remove the old chip, you insert the new one. »
He paused deliberately. The tension in the room rose a notch. The American journalists knew the laws of the market.
A chip of this caliber, a flagship , a technological showcase designed to crush Intel's upcoming Pentium, was logically bound to sell for a prohibitive price, around seven or eight hundred euros. That was the rule for high-end products.
Exclusivity came at a price.
« Intel sells its silicon by the gram, like caviar, » Minh attacked sharply, rejecting all fraternal courtesy. « We, on the other hand, sell our silicon like electricity.
A vital fluid that must flow through every home, every office, and every classroom on the continent. »
The number appeared on the screen in gigantic characters.
« The price of the VESLA 2390 at 275 MHz is set at €100 per unit. »
A physical shockwave rippled through the Salle Pleyel. A few analysts in the front row dropped their pens. One hundred euros.
It was a mathematical anomaly, a distortion of commercial reality. At that price, Volta wasn't selling a processor; they were unleashing a weapon of mass destruction on Silicon Valley's balance sheets. It was an act of price terrorism.
No one could survive such dumping. No one, that is, except a company whose Alsatian foundries saturated the global market with Asian assembly.
But the carnage wasn't over.
The screen came to life to reveal the entire VESLA 2300 range , a cascade of silicon designed to stifle any breathing space for competitors. «Access to the very high end starts at €100,» Minh insisted, unyielding. «But if you need to optimize your company's equipment budget, the same high standards apply at every level.» The pricing structure was imprinted on the spectators' retinas:
VESLA 2380 (250 MHz): €80
VESLA 2370 (225 MHz): €60
VESLA 2360 (200 MHz): €45 «And to round out this range,» the teenager added, «we're introducing a version designed specifically for emerging markets and the education sector. The entry-level processor, the VESLA 2350x , is clocked at 166 MHz.
It has a feature that will bring a smile to the faces of the technicians in this room: its multiplier is completely unlocked.» The screen froze on the last line.
VESLA 2350x (166 MHz, Unlocked): €30
A frenzied murmur rose from the back rows. Thirty euros for an unlocked chip that any computer science student could manually overclock to over 200 MHz in their bedroom. Volta was offering the key to the vault of power for the price of a tank of gas.
It was the premeditated assassination of the very concept of competition. Intel had just been buried alive under an avalanche of sovereign European silicon.
Linh stepped forward again, joining his brother center stage for the final act. Silence fell instantly. The audience was drained, reeling from the avalanche of innovations and exorbitant prices.
Only one piece of information remained to be revealed. The elephant in the room.
The price of revolution. The cost of the VRX-150 .
« Central computing has become more accessible, » Linh continued, his gentle voice contrasting sharply with the stark figures that had just been presented. « But the VRX-150 graphics card isn't just an upgrade.
It's the dawn of a new era. It's the component that allows us to replace multi-ton computing farms with a simple black tower placed under a desk. It's an engineering feat of complexity that the American industry has yet to even begin to explore. »
She let the silence hang in the air.
Behind the scenes, Lazare smiled. Lazarus knew what was coming. The holding company's financial engineering had just laid the perfect trap.
By selling central processing units at ridiculously low prices, Volta created a feeling of absolute gratitude in the consumer. The market felt indebted. The human mind, relieved to have made a killing on the CPU, was now psychologically primed to be fleeced on innovation.
« The price of the Active Bridge Adapter, necessary to connect the card to your older motherboards, will be €15 , Linh announced. And the Volta VRX-150 graphics card , with its 3.8 million transistors and hardware geometry engine, will be available starting next week for €250 . »
The number appeared on the screen in gold letters.
VRX-150: €250
The reaction was immediate. Loud applause erupted, quickly followed by cheers. In the room, the tech press, gamers, and image professionals were ecstatic.
For them, €250 was the price of creative freedom. It was access to the Holy Grail of real-time 3D for a fraction of the cost of an SGI workstation or a supercomputer.
But in the dim light of the control room, leaning against the metal flight cases of the sound equipment, Lazare Bonaparte coldly readjusted his cufflinks, the glow of the control monitors reflecting in his dark eyes.
He watched this gathering of specialists applaud wildly at a masterful scam.
Lazarus knew the factory costs down to the cent. Manufacturing the VRX-150 die at the Strasbourg MegaFab, despite the complexity of the 0.35-micron triple-metal process and the integration of the RAMDAC, cost only twenty-two euros per die with current yields.
Adding the cost of the printed circuit board, the SGRAM video memory, the aluminum heatsink, and the packaging, the total cost of goods sold ( BOM ) did not exceed forty euros. The adapter, meanwhile, cost less than three euros to produce in Huawei's assembly plants.
He had just priced a graphics card at €250, achieving a gross profit margin of over 500% . An obscene, almost insulting rate of return, higher than that of the luxury goods or fine jewelry industries. An additional component that, on its own, cost two-thirds the price of a complete AXIOM computer.
Yet, no one cried foul. No one saw the financial guillotine falling on their wallets. The room applauded the executioner.
Lazare had achieved a masterpiece of asymmetric capitalism. By slashing prices in the saturated and competitive CPU market (the VESLA 2390 at €100), he had ruined his competitors and siphoned off the entire installed base.
Then, he transferred all his profits to a new, monopolistic market that he himself had just created: the consumer GPU market. The customer, mesmerized by the drop in the price of the main brain, blindly paid for the privilege of having eyes.
On stage, Minh and Linh bowed slightly to the standing ovation that shook the balconies of the Salle Pleyel. Journalists were already rushing to the telephone booths in the lobby to dictate their articles.
The era of 3D dominance had just begun.
Lazare turned away from the control room monitors and walked down the service corridor, his back straight, his gait silent. May 1st, 1996, had just ended. Europe had awakened as mistress of the light, and the coffers in Ivry-sur-Seine were about to overflow with billions of euros.
Silicon Valley had just lost the battle for homes. The silicon symphony was playing a requiem for America, and Lazarus hadn't even needed to open his mouth to dictate the score.
Location: Intel Corporation Headquarters (Robert Noyce Building), Santa Clara, California / Microsoft Campus, Redmond, Washington State.
Date: May 1, 1996 (Time difference - Night on the American West Coast).
Point of view: Omniscient (Sliding focus on the American general staff: Andy Grove and Bill Gates).
While the Salle Pleyel emptied under ovations and Europe celebrated its technological liberation, night enveloped the West Coast of the United States in a cloak of polar cold.
In Santa Clara, in the sterile silence of the top floor of the Robert Noyce Building , the screens in Intel Corporation's crisis room played a loop of the hacked footage from the Paris keynote. The simultaneous translation of Minh and Linh Bonaparte's announcements resonated through the speakers with the somber clarity of an obituary.
One hundred euros for a 275 megahertz processor.
A revolutionary graphics card for 250 euros.
The adapter preserves the old motherboard.
Around the large glass table, Intel's board of directors resembled a gathering of generals who had survived a nuclear bombing. For two years, the company that had invented the microprocessor had been in a slow death throes, drained of resources by Volta SA's reckless dumping and crippled by the loss of the Asian and European markets.
Shares had plummeted, long-standing shareholders had cried out for a breakup, and the infighting between the finance department (which championed cost reduction) and the engineering department (which demanded billions for research) had nearly torn the company apart from within.
But tonight, the internecine wars were over. A state of absolute emergency had just been declared. Not by the company's management, but by the United States federal government.
Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel, stood at the head of the table. His face, chiseled and marked by the fatigue of sleepless nights, no longer betrayed the panic of the first months of the crisis. It radiated the cold, cruel determination of a cornered animal ready to bite for the jugular.
« The French have just declared a war of total attrition against us, » Grove began, his voice cutting through the silence of the room. « Bonaparte is no longer trying to gain market share.
He's trying to ruin us. He wants us to die of financial hemorrhage trying to match his prices. »
One of the financial directors, a gray-haired man from Wall Street, wiped the sweat from his brow.
« At one hundred euros a unit for a chip etched at 0.35 microns, our profit margins are obliterated, Andy, » the financier groaned. « If we lower the prices of our next architecture to match the VESLA 2390 , we'll be selling at a loss.
The board will never accept that. Wall Street will slit our throats as soon as the NASDAQ opens tomorrow morning. »
A carnivorous grin distorted Andy Grove's lips.
« Wall Street won't slit our throats, Tom. Because Wall Street just received orders from a higher court. »
Grove pressed a button on his remote control. The main screen switched from images of the Salle Pleyel to a series of classified financial documents, bearing the seal of the United States Treasury Department and the Department of Defense.
The myth of the American free market, of pure and undistorted competition in Silicon Valley, had just been silently assassinated by reasons of state. Faced with the existential threat posed by Volta SA's hegemony over global civilian and military information systems, Washington had decided to bring out the big guns.
The Eagle would not let its largest silicon factory collapse.
« Over the past seventy-two hours, the CEO of Intel detailed with terrifying coldness, the Pentagon and the Federal Reserve have forced a consortium of systemic banks — JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Citibank — as well as major military-industrial groups like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, to inject massive amounts of liquidity into our capital through shell investment funds. »
Grove glanced around the table.
« We have just received an untraceable infusion of eighteen billion dollars. This money is not subject to Wall Street's quarterly profitability requirements. It is a war chest.
The United States government has decided that Intel's survival is a matter of national security. The budget is no longer an obstacle. The bleeding has stopped.
We now have the means to bleed like Bonaparte, drop for drop, dollar for euro, until one of us collapses. »
A murmur of stunned disbelief mixed with relief rippled through the boardroom. They were no longer a company struggling for dividends; they had become an extension of the American military-industrial complex.
They had just been nationalized in secret.
Grove turned to his chief architect, a discreet man sitting in the darkness.
« The funding is secured. Now, let's talk about the weapon. Let's talk about what will crush the VESLA 2390 . »
The chief engineer stood up, connecting his portable terminal to the room's network. The diagram of a processor architecture of astonishing complexity appeared on the screen. «The Pentium Pro ,» announced the architect.
It was Intel's hidden monster. A chip developed in the absolute secrecy of Oregon laboratories, designed specifically to annihilate the Out -of-Order execution of the VESLA series.
« Bonaparte presented a 275-megahertz chip, » the engineer explained, pointing to the diagrams with a laser stylus. « The Pentium Pro will have a native clock speed of 200 megahertz, but frequency isn't everything.
Our architecture introduces fourteen-stage Super-Pipelining and speculative execution with an aggressiveness the French didn't anticipate. Furthermore, we integrate the Level 2 cache directly into the same ceramic package as the processor, operating at core speed, whereas Volta still relies on the cache soldered to the motherboard. »
The engineer turned to Andy Grove.
« In integer calculations and pure floating-point operations, the 200 MHz Pentium Pro equals, or even very slightly surpasses, the 275 MHz VESLA 2390 in our simulations. It's an engineering marvel. On paper, we've eliminated Lazarus's mathematical advantage. »
The room breathed a sigh of relief. Santa Clara's technical honor was intact. But Andy Grove wasn't smiling.
The CEO knew that raw power hadn't been enough to save their market share the previous year. The real lesson of the Salle Pleyel keynote wasn't about megahertz. It was about the socket .
« It's a very beautiful architecture, » Grove acknowledged in a low voice. « But if we require the customer to buy a new motherboard for two hundred dollars to use it, as we traditionally do with each new generation, we're finished.
Napoleon just promised all of Europe that Socket V is eternal. He's turned backward compatibility into a weapon of mass destruction. »
The CEO of Intel placed both hands flat on the glass table, his gaze sweeping over his lieutenants with the harshness of an inquisitor. «Arrogance has killed us, gentlemen. Planned obsolescence, which made our fortune for ten years, is now our tomb.
To kill the monster, we must learn from the monster.» Grove pressed a key, displaying the most humiliating directive in the company's history.
« The Pentium Pro is abandoning its exclusive proprietary interface, » ordered the head of Intel. « We are adopting Lazarus strategy. I demand the immediate design of a unified socket and a hardware adapter, Slot 1 , or an extreme OverDrive interconnect module .
I want any American, Japanese, or European user who has an old Pentium in their living room to be able to buy our $100 Pentium Pro—subsidized by the Pentagon—and plug it directly into their existing machine without changing a single cable on their motherboard. »
The chief engineer turned pale.
« Andy, adapting an architecture with an integrated L2 cache to an older generation front bus will create major thermal and electronic bottlenecks. It's engineering heresy. »
« It's political survival! » Grove practically yelled, his fist slamming down on the table with a crash that startled the board. « Bonaparte did it with his VRX-150 graphics card and adapter!
He admitted to losing 8 percent of his performance, and the whole world applauded his honesty! We'll do the same. I don't care if the Pentium Pro loses 10 percent of its power through backward compatibility.
The end user doesn't care. He wants bargain-basement power, effortlessly. We'll give him exactly what Volta gives him.
We'll copy their zero-friction model. »
Silence fell again, sturdy, oppressive with the humiliation of a giant forced to imitate the methods of an upstart from the Parisian suburbs. «The hardware architecture is set,» Grove concluded, wiping the sweat from his brow. «We have the Treasury's billions. We have the Pentium Pro.
We have the universal socket . Silicon-wise, we're even.» He sank back into his leather armchair, turning his gaze towards the secure phone placed in the center of the table.
« But silicon isn't enough. The boy in Paris was right. Muscles without a nervous system are sterile. And our nervous system is rotting away right here in Washington State. Connect me to Redmond. »
More than a thousand kilometers further north, in the pouring rain of Seattle, the Microsoft campus resembled a besieged fortress.
The Redmond-based company, once a triumphant symbol of the new American economy, was going through the darkest crisis in its history. The figures, compiled by internal analysts and kept secret under threat of immediate dismissal, were brutally clear: Microsoft had lost 60% of its global market share in operating systems to VoltaOS .
Europe had fallen. Asia, led by China and Sony's Japan, had tipped over. Even on American soil, universities and government agencies were beginning to succumb to the allure of the fluidity and security of the French system.
Without secret federal subsidies, massive orders from the US military, and locked-in contracts with government agencies, Microsoft would have had to lay off forty percent of its workforce.
In his panoramic office, Bill Gates no longer had the air of the relaxed young prodigy who had conquered the world. His glasses seemed too big for his emaciated face, hollowed by nerve ulcers and the permanent specter of Lazare Bonaparte.
The video conference screen lit up, displaying the hard and ruthless face of Andy Grove. The Wintel alliance (Windows + Intel), which had once dictated its law to the entire planet, was painfully reforming, united by the urgency of annihilation.
« You saw the conference, Bill, » Grove attacked without a hint of politeness. « Linh Bonaparte humiliated our interface.
VoltaOS X 3.4 uses hardware acceleration of the graphics processor to handle windowing. They made computing liquid. Meanwhile, your operating system keeps hogging the CPU just to move a damn icon on a desktop. »
Gates crossed his fingers, striving to maintain the composure of a cornered billionaire. He knew the flaws in his own creation. Windows 95 had been a compromise, an unstable graphical layer laid upon the archaic foundations of MS-DOS, weighed down by thousands of lines of obsolete code, bloatware accumulated over the years to fulfill commercial agreements.
Until now, Microsoft hadn't cared: they were counting on Intel to release ever-faster processors to compensate, through sheer power, for the heaviness and inefficiency of their code.
But Lazare Bonaparte had destroyed this dynamic. Volta had optimized the harmony between silicon and software.
« The days of bloated systems are over, Andy, » replied Bill Gates, his voice hoarse. « I purged the software engineering department eight months ago. We fired every executive who refused to abandon the DOS legacy.
I haven't slept more than four hours a night since last year's disaster. We didn't ignore Volta's warning. »
Gates rotated his screen to share the view of his own build servers.
« We're throwing our last reserves into the battle. I present to you the finalized project. This won't be a simple update. We're starting from scratch. Windows 96 ( W96 ). »
Grove leaned towards his screen, scrutinizing the lines of technical documentation that scrolled by.
« We rewrote the kernel, » Gates explained, the spark of the original coder rekindling in his tired eyes. « Windows 96 is a pure preemptive multitasking operating system, stripped of sixty percent of its dead code.
It's lighter, infinitely smoother, and most importantly, it's designed to offload the load from the central processing unit (CPU). We introduced the second-generation DirectDraw API , optimized to the extreme for zero-latency communication with 2D and 3D acceleration chips. »
The founder of Microsoft slammed his fist on his desk.
« If your Pentium Pro delivers the mathematical power you promise, Andy, Windows 96 won't waste it. My OS will use less than 10% of the system's resources when running natively. Everything else will be dedicated to the user's application.
We've redesigned the graphical interface, smoothed out the animations, and optimized RAM management to avoid the dreaded blue screens of death that used to make the engineers in Ivry-sur-Seine laugh. On paper, W96 is the perfect equivalent of VoltaOS X 3.4 . »
Grove listened silently, gauging the sincerity of the Microsoft founder. «It's no longer a question of code, Bill. It's a question of national survival. The White House is showering us with cash, but the global market isn't going to give us any breaks.
We 're releasing the backward-compatible Pentium Pro at a subsidized price to match their VESLA 2390 's €100 . You're going to have to make a similar effort with your software licenses.» Windows 96 update will be free for all American users and sold at a loss in Europe," Gates said, a hint of bitterness in his voice.
« I've already approved the plan with my board. It's a scorched-earth policy. We're giving away the software to win back hard drives. »
The two titans of the American technology industry fell silent, measuring the magnitude of the chasm before them.
The Wintel alliance had just aligned itself with all the variables of the Volta equation.
They had the raw power with the Pentium Pro, matching the 275 MHz of the French chip thanks to an aggressive architecture.
They had software fluidity with the purged and redesigned kernel of Windows 96 .
They had adopted the strategy of scalability by accepting the humiliation of the backward compatible socket or hardware adapters.
And they had the tariff firepower, fueled by billions of dollars from the US federal government to align with the suicidal tariffs dictated by Lazarus of Ivry.
On paper, America had just cloned the French miracle. The technological race was back on.
But deep down, Andy Grove knew that the equation was no longer simply a matter of megahertz or lines of code. The Intel CEO muted his microphone for a moment, letting the hum of the Santa Clara servers fill the room, before resuming his speech. «We've closed the technological gap, Bill.
We have the power. We have the price,» Grove murmured, the anxiety finally piercing through the leader's steely mask. «So what terrifies you now, Andy?» asked Gates, sensing his partner's visceral doubt.
« The psychology of the market. »
Grove stood up, approached the large bay window of his office, contemplating the distant lights of Silicon Valley, the cradle of innovation that Volta SA threatened to transform into a mere industrial graveyard.
« Lazare Bonaparte didn't just sell cheap silicon to Europe and Asia, Bill. He sold them emancipation. He convinced three continents that our technology, our processors, and our operating systems were merely the bars of a virtual prison controlled by Washington.
He transformed VESLA and VoltaOS into symbols of national sovereignty. »
Grove closed his eyes, dwelling on the standing ovation Minh and Linh had received in Paris.
« We can produce the best processor in the world. You can code the most perfect operating system in history. We've proven we can make keys as brilliant as his. »
Silence fell again, charged with the fatalism of a declining empire.
« But the real question, the one that will decide whether we survive next winter, is something else entirely, » concluded the Intel CEO, his voice trailing off into the vast conference room. « Now that Europe and Asia have tasted freedom, will they willingly return to the prison of Washington, even if we have repainted the bars gold? »
At the other end of the encrypted connection, Bill Gates had no answer to offer.
The American Eagle had just acquired sharp titanium claws, ready to tear Volta SA's flesh in the coming quarter. The Pentium Pro and Windows 96 were about to flood the North American market with fierce patriotic propaganda.
But the soul of consumers now defied the laws of pure engineering.
The cyberwar was only just beginning, and this time, it wouldn't be fought in the laboratories of Santa Clara or Strasbourg, but in the hearts and pride of hundreds of millions of citizens around the world. The wounded titan awaited dawn to launch its counter-offensive, praying that the economic rationality of consumers would stifle their thirst for independence.
The final confrontation between Lazarus's system and the Pentagon's armada was fast approaching.