14 Oct
2008
14 Oct
'08
10:14 a.m.
On 14 Oct 2008 at 12:42, Dave McGuire wrote:
Waferscale was his company? I didn't know
that. I have quite a
few of their chips. I think (but am not certain) that they got
swallowed up by STMicro.
No, it was Trilogy that I was thinking of. Trilogy was among the
first to try to build a system-on-a-wafer, burning through a huge
amount of capital, eventually abandoning the effort and changing
focus to build VAX-compatible systems by taking the remaining VC and
merging with Elxsi. A lesser-known personality would have been
forced to shut down by the venture partners before being allowed to
change direction so drastically.
Amdahl is the perfect argument for the notion of success in a startup
having a very large component of luck involved--and an argument
against the notion of a "Midas touch" in innovators.
Does anyone have one of the Elxsi systems in their collection?
Cheers,
Chuck