While digging up info on the LSI LOGIC chip used on the Apple IIe Card, I came across a book about LSI which provided some very interest historical info I had never read anywhere else. Amazing what could have been!
One day Doug came in with a copy of EE Times. It had a photo of Steve Jobs and on his desk was the Mead-Conway textbook! So I called Steve and let him know that VLSI was the leading practitioner of Mead-Conway in the entire universe (Steve likes that kind of talk). The conversation led to VLSI's very early involvement in the Macintosh computer.
The early people at VLSI came from the same group at Xerox PARC that Apple courted for the Mac team. One time Apple and VLSI were trying to hire the same engineer and I got a call from Jobs. He reminded me how many ROMS and custom ICs Apple might buy from VLSI, and let on that he was personally interested in this particular engineer. The bidding stopped that day. We got no future draft choices, but Apple is still a very big customer of VLSI.
DOUG FAIRBAIRN
Our next milestone was the Bagpipe Project. It was the "lost summer of 1982." In one of our early classes, Burl Smith from Apple got excited about ASIC. He was the lead hardware designer for what was to become the Macintosh, and he convinced Apple management that they should pursue Mead-Conway technology to implement everything except the CPU and memory.
We had a handshake agreement, and we started the design with absolutely no formal arrangements. In fact, the day Burl Smith showed up, he said that since we were doing the ASIC as a side deal, we could throw out the existing spec and add more cool features. The day we started, we were two weeks behind!
We busted our pick for the next six months working on this chip—we were fighting power and size and everything. It had a very fast, dynamic memory control on chip and logic to control the video, the sound, the mouse, and the keyboard. We had nearly everybody at VLSI working on the project overtime.
As the project grew, we brought in more and more people because of the business potential. But just as we got the silicon almost working, Steve Jobs canceled the project. We learned an incredible amount from the experience, but it was a low point because we had just spent our hearts and souls on the project and it got cancelled. Apple could have introduced a fully integrated Mac based on this chip.
—Silicon Destiny: The Story of Application Specific Integrated Circuits and Lsi Logic Corporation, pp197~198
