Semi Doped Pub Quiz
In 1988, an Israeli-born engineer who had cracked a stubborn problem in memory - how to make a single cell reliably trap and hold electric charge with the power switched off - set out to build (with two others) a company around the idea. He wanted a bright, optimistic name, and the one that stuck evoked the nearest star.
Seven years later, on the eve of the company’s stock market debut, a much larger Silicon Valley computer maker that shared that same three-letter celestial prefix objected to it. Rather than fight, the founders changed exactly one vowel. The swap was quiet, but it buried a small joke inside the name: read the first four letters aloud and you get the granular material that silicon itself is refined from. Asked about the change, the chief executive confirmed the pun, saying the new opening syllable stood for silicon.
Name the company.
CLUES
The company went on to help create the small removable cards that fed a generation of digital cameras and phones. One of its co-founders later left to run one of America’s two big memory makers.