Oak Technology

Oak Technology was an American supplier of semiconductor chips for sound cards, graphics cards and optical storage devices such as CD-ROM, CD-RW and DVD. It achieved success with optical storage chips and its stock price increased substantially around the time of the tech bubble in 2000. After falling on hard times, in 2003 it was acquired by Zoran Corporation.

Oak Technology helped develop the ATAPI standard and provided the oakcdrom.sys CD-ROM driver that was ubiquitous on DOS-based systems in the mid-1990s.

Oak Technology, Inc was founded in 1987 and was based in Sunnyvale, California, USA. During the late 1980s through the early 1990s, Oak was a supplier of PC graphics (SVGA) chipsets and PCBs. Oak Technology also supplied mother board chipsets - a PS2 compatible chipset and the Oaknote chipset for notebooks. Oak enjoyed modest success in the value segment (low-end) of the market, but without an effective Windows accelerator, ultimately failed to remain competitive.

In 1994, Sun Microsystems decided to change the name of their new language from Oak to Java because Oak was already trademarked by Oak Technology.

The company had a dominant position early on in the market for semiconductors for CD-ROM drives (around 1995) and later regained a prominent position in optical storage chips as the market transitioned to recordable/rewritable technology, resulting in substantial revenue growth and stock price appreciation at the height of the tech bubble in 2000.

However, the company could not maintain growth and the stock price declined substantially, including a drop by more than half on 19 June 2002.

It then acquired the pioneering digital TV chip company Teralogic at the end of 2002 whose technology would later contribute to Zoran's DTV chip development after Zoran acquired Oak Technology in 2003.

OTI037C 8-bit VGA chipset, with up to 256KB of DRAM. Provided support for VGA, EGA & CGA display modes. Most are only able to do standard VGA modes. (i.e. up to 320x200x256 and up to 640x480x16).

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