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Re: Zip?

dempson@atlantis.actrix.gen.nz (David Empson) writes:

> There was the Rocket Chip, made by Bits & Pieces, but
>Zip sued it (and them?) out of existence.

Yep. Zip originally hired two guys to do some design work for them, but the
guys ran off with Zip's circuit and started Bits & Pieces. Zip blew them
out of the water by showing that their patent was violated.

Bits & Pieces also licensed "their" technology to AE before they got nuked --
this was the source of the ill-fated Transwarp II board that AE had to pull
from the market after selling relatively few of them. Yes, this explains why
the Transwarp II was such a small, clean board and the Transwarp III was a
huge forest of DIPs. I think they had to do the III on pretty short notice
and didn't spend a lot of time trying to optimize it very much.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ ugcs.caltech.edu