What's Intel Inside?

An error.

Such was the joke from the 1990s. Intel, the company behind PC microprocessors, came up with the Pentium, the revolutionary evolution that was supposed to propel computers into the 21st century. With it came the ever-present Intel Inside campaign, with a memorable chime at the end.

One problem: Pentiums couldn't divide.

As it was discovered, under some circumstances Pentiums did not calculate floating points properly. Oh, those cases were rare, but how can you trust your computer when it can't divide 4,195,835 by 3,145,727 correctly?

All this happened under the watch of Andrew Grove, a Hungarian-born Jew who escaped to the west when the Soviets invaded in 1956. Grove served as CEO of Intel for a decade and was instrumental in not just the development of microprocessors, but the overall growth of Silicon Valley.

But, yeah, his computers couldn't divide.