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T A B L E__T A L K Is spam really all that bad? Weigh in on electronic junk mail in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Customer disservice Does God have an e-mail address? Tinkerer's paradise Let's Get This Straight Who owns the desktop?
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T H E_t r a n s m e t a_E N I G M A AT A TANTALIZINGLY ELUSIVE SILICON VALLEY
START-UP, SECRECY SPAWNS HOPES OF REVOLUTION
AND A RAFT OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES.
BY ANDREW LEONARD | The address for Transmeta -- a mysterious, supersecretive Silicon Valley start-up rumored to be working on a revolutionary new chip -- is 3940 Freedom Circle in Santa Clara. But according to my 7-year-old map of San Jose, Freedom Circle does not exist. That, in itself, did not alarm me. Yesterday's maps are always out-of-date in the Valley. It's not unusual for high-tech business parks to spring up, fully formed, between one morning and the next -- especially here, practically under the shadow of Intel headquarters. If Silicon Valley had a ground zero, this would be it. But my suspicions grew after I arrived at the doors of Transmeta, a one-story, low-slung stucco-roofed office building with impenetrably dark floor-to-ceiling windows. The trees dotting the parking lot looked much older than my dogeared map. Had the building been constructed around the trees? Or had these trees been shipped in, fully grown -- a minor detail of state-of-the-art landscaping practice? I'd seen it happen before. As I wandered around the Transmeta building sizing up the trees, I reflected that I was acting just a bit paranoid. But with good reason, I reassured myself, as I glanced over my shoulder, half-expecting to see Thomas Pynchon lurking about. Think about it: The very name Transmeta -- a combination of Latin and Greek words that together could mean "above the beyond" or "across the next level " -- connotes a meaninglessness so vast it might be profound. Or maybe not. Once upon a time, only a Pynchon would have dared such silliness. And only a Pynchon could have conjured up the Transmeta scenario: A start-up company backed in part by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen attracts international attention by hiring one of the most famous programmers in the world -- free-software hero Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system. Then it refuses to say a single word about what he or the rest of the company is cooking up behind closed doors. The story of Transmeta is laced with the kind of satirical geek humor that was once safely confined between the covers of novels by Pynchon or Neal Stephenson but is now irresistibly infecting the real-life operating system of Silicon Valley. The Web page for Transmeta says only: "This web page is not here yet." If you peek at the source code for the page, hoping for illumination, you're informed, "There are no secret messages in the source code to this Web page." In a particularly Pynchonesque stroke of ironic bravado, Transmeta even paid good money two years ago to a San Mateo consultant for the construction of a "corporate identity package." Apparently it's not easy, in the late '90s, to be a cipher. Even secrecy needs a branding campaign. So what is Transmeta -- a company that makes the words "low profile" seem brassily exhibitionist -- up to? The consensus is that the hardware engineers and software programmers at Transmeta are "top-notch" and "incredibly bright." "They've got an unbelievably dense crop of talent," says EE Times technology columnist Alexander Wolfe. But no one seems to know what all these brilliant minds are doing. All roads to Transmeta lead straight to zipped lips sealed by nondisclosure agreements. "They have been incredibly secretive," says Nathan Brookwood, chief chip analyst for Dataquest. "They're not talking, haven't been talking, and they've been at it for over a year, almost two years. You'd think they would have something by now." "I've known [Transmeta CEO and founder] Dave Ditzel for 15 years," says independent chip designer John Wharton, "and I still don't have the foggiest notion what they are doing. I've asked Dave, and he just smiles and says, come on down, sign an NDA and I'll tell you." - - - - - - - - - - - -
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW LEONARD |
