"Now he was a celebrity - celebrated on the covers of business magazines, adored by the Intel shareholders to whom he had delivered 40 per cent annual returns over his decade at the company's helm, and rich beyond most people's dreams."The level of that fame became apparent earlier this year, when London Business School invited him to deliver a lecture. The appearance - "more of an all-singing, all-dancing multimedia presentation than a mere speech" - meant that the brilliant Hungarian- born engineer had arrived, says Mr Jackson. As former Independent journalist Tim Jackson writes in his recently-published book Inside Intel (HarperCollins, pounds 19.99), the watershed came exactly a year ago when Andy Grove, Intel's chief executive, gave a presentation at Comdex, the computer industry's annual trade festival in Las Vegas. Before it emerged that Microsoft faced a $1m-a-day fine from the US Justice Department over its attempt to make its Internet platform an industry standard, Intel ended its war with Digital Equipment over alleged patent infringements by agreeing to buy a sizeable part of the Massachusetts company.Microsoft has long been the subject of books and lengthy magazine articles, but little has been known about Intel - at least until recently But things have begun to change. Among the most intriguing of the companies that make up this increasingly powerful sector is Intel.
Though it has recently launched consumer advertising on television, the organisation is chiefly known through the "Intel Inside" slogan generally seen as a badge of quality for personal computers. The fact that this slogan is there due to Intel's policy of paying PC makers a portion of their marketing costs if they carry it is just one of the dark and mysterious ways in which the company has become one of the industry's biggest players since being founded in 1968. Just as Microsoft has convinced the public that, in computing, the software is generally more important than the hardware, so Intel has put across the notion that the truly significant part of the hardware is the microprocessor, or chip.Microsoft and Intel have another thing in common: both have become so prominent in their fields that they have fought lengthy battles with the few companies prepared to take them, on and with the anti-trust authorities. I just hope it will prove to have been the right business decision.". Few industries grip the public imagination like the computer business, particularly that significant chunk of it based in California's Silicon Valley. "Back home I was in danger of slipping into the 'comfy zone' - life had become too comfortable I wanted a fresh challenge and certainly got it. Although the bulk of the bird's grazing land remains uncultivated, the British farmers have persuaded the local nature conservationists to lift their objection to some of the land being ploughed and are hopeful that, eventually, they may even qualify for some form of compensation."Coming here has meant going through a steep learning curve," said Mr Knight, who has acquired a stake in the company managing the farm as part of the price for uprooting to Hungary.
"It's good for us and it's good for you too!" enthused Sandor Oravecz, a senior figure in the agriculture ministry.That said, the EU still feels a long way from the flatlands of the Hungarian puszta close to the borders with both Romania and Ukraine. "Realistically we now think we will begin to see a return on our investment in three to five years."While many Hungarians remain strongly opposed to foreigners being allowed to own land here at all, the country's ruling Socialists recognise that, with sights set on joining the EU, Hungary's poorly structured agricultural sector could benefit from western know-how and investment. The main market remains the internal Hungarian one, but Mr Knight and his partners are already looking further afield, in the short term towards Poland, the Baltic states and other former Soviet republics, and longer term to the lucrative EU markets."At the moment there are a lot of barriers to selling our produce in the EU, but when Hungary eventually joins the Union we will hopefully gain equal and fair access," said Mr Knight. "At first they didn't want the new machines - but when they saw what they could do they were won over."Arable crops - wheat, maize, sugar beets and peas - are the farm's mainstay, but it also boasts a 450-strong dairy herd.