15 Feb
2008
15 Feb
'08
8:16 a.m.
Al Kossov said:
That seems highly unlikely. The PIC was being worked
on at GI on
Long Island when I was doing a project for GI in the late 70's on
a CP-1600 system. The designers were Scottish. I tried to convince
them
to make the architecture more like the 1600's (ie.
PDP-11 like)
because
I thought the 11 was a better architecture than what
they were coming
up
with.
IIRC the lead designers were Don Butler and Ken Naife (sp?) and the
manager was Steve Maine (all English to split hairs, although they had
migrated to Long Island from GI in Glenrothes, Scotland) who had earlier
worked on the Mattel games chips. This design team was earlier the top
end of the Hughes Microelectronics design group based in Weybridge
(where I also worked) but split off to join the embryonic GI in
Glenrothes. The GI Glenrothes facility was actually started up by a
breakaway group of the bulk of the senior management of Elliots
Microelectronics also in Glenrothes when GEC took the decision to move
the facility south and amalgamate it with some other scraps of GEC's
empire. Oddly I also worked for both Elliott's and later GEC's
microelectronics companies - a small incestuous world in those days. The
PIC at that time was an nmos design and the first of the cmos family was
still being worked on when I left GI in 1982.
regards
Bob Adamson