Steve Jobs' high-profile raid on IBM's managerial ranks hit a snag on Friday.

A judge in White Plains, N.Y., ordered Mark Papermaster — IBM's (IBM) former top microprocessor executive and Apple's (AAPL) newest senior VP — to immediately stop working for Jobs.

It's the latest chapter in a bi-coastal drama that pits one of the world's largest and most established technology companies against one of the brashest. Here's a timeline:

• January 2008: Robert Mansfield, Apple's VP for computer hardware development, includes Papermaster's name in a short list of possible hires. The two were classmates at the University of Texas at Ausin and both worked at IBM.
• February 2008: Papermaster is invited to Cupertino to meet Jobs and discuss an unnamed "senior leadership position" involving product development in consumer electronics.
• A few weeks later, Apple calls to say the senior leadership position is no longer open and offers him a less senior position in laptop design. He declines.
• April 2008: Apple acquires P.A. Semi (formerly Palo Alto Semiconductor), a maker of power-efficient processors based on IBM's "Power" architecture.
• September 2008: Papermaster, whom IBM in court papers describes as the company's "top expert in 'Power' architecture and technology" [PDF], gets another call from Apple. Steve Jobs wants to talk to him.
• Oct. 7: Papermaster meets with Jobs, Tony Fadell (head of the iPod and iPhone division), and others. He's told that Fadell is leaving, and that Jobs is looking to replace him. The next day, Papermaster meets with Fadell's team.
• Friday Oct 10: Jobs makes Papermaster an offer he can't refuse — a "once in a lifetime opportunity" to head the iPod and iPhone division.
• Monday Oct. 13: Papermaster informs his superiors at IBM that he intends to accept the job. They tell him they suspect Apple's interest in him has something to do with P.A. Semi.
• Monday Oct. 20: IBM offers Papermaster a "substantial increase" to persuade him to stay.
• During the same conversation, IBM reminds Papermaster that he has signed an agreement that bars him from working for an IBM competitor for one year. [PDF] It offers Papermaster a year's salary if he will respect the agreement. Papermaster says he needs time to think it over.
• Tuesday Oct. 21: Papermaster submits his resignation the next day. He is scheduled to leave the company at week's end and start working for Apple in November.
• Wednesday Oct. 22: IBM files a 10-page complaint in the Southern District of New York to prevent Papermaster, "who is in the possession of significant and highly-confidential IBM trade secrets and know-how" from accepting an executive position with Apple. IBM describes Apple as a competitor that is trying to expand its presence in the markets for servers and chips for handheld devices.
• Tuesday Nov. 4: After the Wall St. Journal breaks the story, Apple issues a press release announcing that Papermaster had been named senior VP of devices hardware engineering to lead the iPod and iPhone division, the job formerly held by Tony Fadell (see here). Neither chips nor servers are mentioned.
• Thursday Nov. 6: Papermaster files court papers arguing that Apple and IBM are in totally different businesses — one focused on high-performance business systems, the other on consumer-oriented hardware and related products. [PDF]

• Friday Nov. 7: Robert Cringely publishes a column echoing the conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley — that Papermaster's position as head of the iPod and iPhone division is a subterfuge, a "placeholder" until his noncompete year is up and he can take the job for which he was really hired: "to lead Appleā€™s PA Semi acquisition and create a new family of scalable processors optimized for Snow Leopard and beyond."
• Later that afternoon: Federal District Judge Kenneth Karas in White Plains grants IBM a preliminary injunction, ordering Mark Papermaster to "immediately cease his employment with Apple Inc. until further order of this court." [PDF] IBM PR expresses satisfaction. Apple PR expresses confidence that Papermaster "will be able to ultimately join Apple when the dust settles." (link) Papermaster cannot be reached.

Papermaster's lawyers have until Tuesday Nov. 11 to submit objections. A hearing is set for November 18.

UPDATE: Reading Mark Papermaster's statement in full, I discover that it had been taken it out of context. The full quote, reproduced at the bottom of this post, makes a lot more sense. My apologies to Mr. Papermaster.

- – -

"I do not recall a single instance of Apple being described as a competitor of IBM during my entire tenure at IBM."

I did mental double take when I read those words, and I suspect I was not alone.

They were filed in a U.S. district court in Manhattan early Friday by Mark Papermaster, a 25-year IBM veteran and, as of Tuesday, Apple's newest senior VP.

Papermaster is stepping into the spot recently vacated by Tony Fadell. (See The man who made the iPod.)

IBM had filed suit to block the move, claiming that Papermaster was violating "his contractual obligation to refrain from working for an IBM competitor for one year."

Papermaster's response was that IBM (IBM) doesn't compete with Apple (AAPL) and as far as he knows, it hasn't for the past 25 years.

Huh? That's news to me — and I suspect it will be news to Steve Jobs.

I remember 1983. The IBM PC was two years old and the Apple II and III were rapidly losing market share. The Lisa came out that January, but was destined to be a commercial flop.

Jobs, who had been kicked out of the Lisa project the year before, was pouring his energy into the Mac, which would debut the following year, heralded by the famous "1984" commercial.

Jobs certainly seemed to know who his competition was. That fall, when he previewed the so-called Big Brother ad in a keynote address, he introduced it with these words:

"It is now 1984. It appears IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers initially welcoming IBM with open arms now fear an IBM dominated and controlled future. They are increasingly turning back to Apple as the only force that can ensure their future freedom. IBM wants it all and is aiming its guns on its last obstacle to industry control: Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right?" (link)

I know IBM is an enormous company with many large divisions, and that for most of his career, Papermaster worked on silicon chips and servers, not PCs.

And I know that it's been several years since IBM competed in consumer electronics, having sold its Personal Computing Division to Lenovo in 2005.

But to think that Mark Papermaster could have started at IBM in 1983 and worked there a quarter century without ever once hearing Apple described as a competitor — well, it boggles this tech reporter's mind.

UPDATE: 9to5 Mac reports that in a filing made public after markets closed on Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Kenneth Karas ordered Papermaster to "immediately cease his employment with Apple Inc. until further order of this court."

For the latest on the case, see The Papermaster Chronicles.

[Kudos to Information Week's Paul McDougall for spotting the court documents. You can read more of Papermaster's statement here.]

UPDATE 2: It turns out that Paul McDougall led us all on a merry chase. Papermaster's full statement, copied below, acknowledges that IBM and Apple have indeed been competitors from time to time in the past.

This reporter's mind is unboggled and his respect for Mr. Papermaster's integrity renewed.

Big news for Apple in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal: The company is losing one of its stars, Tony Fadell.

Tony who?

If Steve Jobs didn't loom so large in Apple's public persona — drawing the spotlight at every appearance — a lot fewer people would be asking that today.

Fadell was — and until he leaves at an as-yet undisclosed time for "personal reasons," still is — the top engineer in a company renown for its engineering prowess. At Business 2.0, the now-defunct Time Inc. monthly, we ranked him No. 27 on our 2007 list of "50 Who Matter Now" in the world of business.

And when Fortune tried earlier this year to handicap who might be best equipped to replace Steve Jobs as Apple's CEO, Fadell came in No. 2, after COO Tim Cook. Here's how we described him then:

Tony Fadell
Title: Senior vice president, iPod division

With his American swagger and his hair bleached white, Fadell stood out at button-down Philips Electronics, where he led an in-house pirate operation designing Windows CE-based devices. It was there that he came up with the idea of marrying a Napster-like music store with a hard drive-based MP3 player. He shopped the concept around the Valley before Apple's Jon Rubinstein snapped it up and put Fadell in charge of the engineering team that built the first iPod. Ambitious and charismatic (and no longer a bleached blond), he now runs the hardware division that makes two of Apple's three key product lines: the iPod and the iPhone. (link)

Fadell will reportedly be replaced by Mark Papermaster, the top IBM executive who managed the company's blade server business. IBM (IBM) sued Papermaster last week over a noncompete clause in his contract to try to prevent him from joining Apple (AAPL). See here.

In a press release issued Tuesday morning, Apple announced that Papermaster had been named senior vice president of devices hardware engineering, reporting directly to Steve Jobs.

According to the release, Fadell and his wife Danielle Lambert, a VP of human resources, "are reducing their roles within the company as they devote more time to their young family. Fadell will remain at Apple as an advisor to the CEO. Lambert will depart the company at the end of this year after a successor is in place."