It was just twenty years ago that the Churchill club was founded--two decades of podiums filled with Silicon Valley's luminaries and legends.

Rich Karlgaard, co-founder of the Churchill Club and publisher of Forbes magazine, said Robert Noyce, Intel's co-founder and first CEO gave the first Churchill Club address, a forgettable performance. For the 20th Anniversary dinner Paul Ottelini, Intel's newly appointed CEO will provide the speech.

The topic 20 years ago was the urgent need for tariffs against Japanese memory chip imports--something which did occur. Intel used to be a big memory chip maker, and one of the most strident lobbyists for import duties on Japanese memory chip competitors.

I remember writing about those times, I had arrived in San Francisco just one year prior to the founding of the Churchill Club.

Not long after Mr Noyce's Churchill Club speech, Intel abandoned memory chips in favor of the fat margins on microprocessors.

And forcing Japanese chip makers to charge more for their chips backfired on the US, because it sent boatloads of capital from the US to Japan.

In today's times the thinking would be: cheap chips equals good; because you can make digital products cheaper which grows the overall market. [As long as you can scramble up the value chain fast enough.]

If Japanese competitors were dumping chips below their cost of manufacture, then that is a good thing--it subsidizes the end user market and will eventually kill them.

Intel and the other US chipmakers moved into higher margin products, which is the natural scheme of such things. And the cash-rich Japanese chipmakers fell behind in chip making because they funneled their investment capital into other industries.

Later in the evening TP waxed lyrical on two of his favorite subjects Bush, and Wall Street Journal Editorials. At one point, he called the Economist magazine "Ecommunist" which, I thought, was quite a witty twist, but Tony said it was just a slip of his tongue.

Next up at 10.10am--Churchill Club 20th anniversary event:The radical nature of online news...more than ten years ago.