A British engineer collected a $10,000 bounty for turning in his near-mint copy of a famous forty-year-old electronics magazine, but not before irking university librarians who rushed to secure their copies from thieves.
Intel Corp. this month posted a reward for a copy of the April 1965 issue of Electronics, in which company co-founder Gordon Moore accurately forecast years of exponential improvements in computer chip performance. Later dubbed Moore's Law, the forecast has become gospel for $200 billion chip industry.
News of the reward reached Surrey, England, where an engineer named David Clark found a copy under the floorboards of his house among piles of other publications. "It is the most bizarre thing that has ever happened to me," Clark, a self- described hoarder, told the BBC.
He said he plans to use the money to help fund his daughters' weddings.
Intel's high-profile bounty, posted on the Web auction site eBay, sent librarians around the United States scrambling to lock-down copies before bounty hunters arrived.
"Somebody thought it was a cute idea," sniffed Stanford University librarian Karen Greig, who sent the equivalent of an all points bulletin to other librarians urging them to protect their copies. "The engineering library was not happy."
The warning was too late for the University of Illinois, whose copy had already disappeared, Greig said.
"People see money," she said.
Intel spokesman Manny Vara said the company's listing turned up two dozen leads, but many of them turned out to be digital reprints, photocopies, or originals that were bound with other issues and could not be separated without destroying the original binding. Two other good copies turned up, but neither were in as good condition as Clark's, he said.
After it retrieves the article from Clark next week, Intel plans to put the magazine on public display at the company's museum in its Santa Clara, California headquarters, Vara said.
The chip maker might still purchase a few more copies, Vara said. One would serve as a backup for the museum, the other to give to Moore himself, who lent out his copy years ago and lost track of it.