Don White designed the FPP8/A. From my recollection, the unit that was sold with 8/A was the second iteration of an Omnibus FPP8. I waa off in LCG working on Jupiter so I never got to see the original but I recall that the redesign to use the cycle stealing version that went to market was because the original 8/A version was too "powerful" meaning that it out performed all of the PDP-11 FPP units and was more precise. I recall it was capable of 72 bit vice 36 bit max operations. The marketed design was a cost reduced and really an extraordinary simple design, elegant would be a better description. I seem to recall the original was built around either ALU or 4 bit Slice chips like AMD2901 or some variation of a TRW chip. bob