Nobody is quite sure who first expressed the thought (attribution has been given to Robert Heinlein, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill and Paul Saffo at the Institute for the Future, among others), but someone once noted that we tend to overestimate the short-term impact of a new technology and underestimate its long-term impact.

There are few examples that epitomize that adage more than Ramtron International Corp. (Nasdaq:RMTR) in Colorado Springs, Colo. The company was founded in 1984 as a research and development company to develop a new memory chip to exploit a phenomenon known as ferroelectricity. That phenomenon, discovered in 1921, is one in which certain materials can be made to exhibit electric polarization — plus or minus — and maintain that state indefinitely. It’s similar to ferromagnetism, in which materials such as iron can become magnetized and remain that way.

The promise of FRAM (ferroelectric random access memory) chips looked exciting. By applying an outside electrical field, the polarity of the ferroelectric material can be reversed. That theoretically made it possible to create a ferroelectric chip that could be programmed with the binary language of today’s electronics but with no danger of being erased by magnetic interference.

Ramtron succeeded by late 1992, and between 1993 and 1997 it built and operated a manufacturing plant to make ferroelectric memory chips. The chips are very fast, with extraordinarily high endurance — they can be written and re-written over a trillion times.

Based on that promise, the company went public in early 1993 at $7 per share; the stock doubled by August 1995. But, as with many new inventions, the marketplace was slow to adopt it. Four years later it was a penny stock, and instituted a 1:5 reverse-split in October 1999.

It’s proving to be a long road back. In the last six years, the stock has . . .

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