I vaguely remember a story about an accidental single point of failure. If I recall correctly, during the 1970s or 1980 there was a critical part of the wafer p

I vaguely remember a story about an accidental single point of failure. If I recall correctly, during the 1970s or 1980 there was a critical part of the wafer production process (slicing the crystal into wafers, perhaps?) which relied on highly specialized tooling. As it turns out, a bunch of manufacturers had independently discovered that by far the best source of them was a small company in Japan - unbeknownst to them essentially just one guy and his workshop. So everyone sourced it from him. Which was fine, until he took a holiday for the first time in a decade... Suddenly both original-source and second-source factories for some important chips were unavailable! I'd love to know if anyone has more details, because I haven't had any luck with finding any reference to it. It's a story I read probably a decade ago, so who knows how many details I got wrong.