Stolen designs

[Roy L. Fuchs]

And Motorola took the 6800 guys to court. So they changed it into 6502 asfaik.

Huh?! The 68000 series was out for a *LONG* time.

 

[John Fields]

.

And I stole nothing but the arrangement of the
connectors on their front panel: my design was original.

---
Hmmm...

"No your honor, I don't really consider that to be stealing. I was
hungry, you see...

 

[John Larkin]

John,
You are absolutely correct! I designed a 68000 emulator in the middle
80's
about ... almost 20 years ago....... gulp!

Most of my products contain an MC68332 uP, and we're still designing
new gadgets around it. It's a lovely instruction set, which I always
program in assembly. I keep checking with OnSemi about the production
status, and they assure me it's good and that they are still
soliciting new customers for it. The depletion-load NMOS MC6800 was in
production for over 20 years! Meanwhile, Intel has introduced and
dumped 10 or 20 generations of embedded products, cancelling some just
after samples were available. They just dumped the Xscale stuff, their
version of Arm (or Mips? I forget.)

John

 

[John Larkin]

The Motorola 68000 instruction set was an exact copy of the DEC Vax
system.

And Motorola took the 6800 guys to court. So they changed it into 6502 asfaik.[/QUOTE]

Moto invented the 6800. Some of their guys spun off and formed MOS
Technology and they cloned the 6800. Moto sued them, so they re-did
the instruction set to make the 6502. Woz picked the 6502 for the
Apple I because he could get a few samples cheap.

John

 

[John Larkin]

Huh?! The 68000 series was out for a *LONG* time.

The 68K family started in the early 70's and is still going strong.
The latest versions are RISC machines (all or mostly all hard-coded),
the Coldfire and (I think) Dragonball things. We still use the 68332,
with the nice CPU32 core, with cool stuff like a 64/32 hardware
divide.

John

 

[John Larkin]

Most of my products contain an MC68332 uP, and we're still designing
new gadgets around it. It's a lovely instruction set, which I always
program in assembly. I keep checking with OnSemi

Oops, Freescale.

John

 

[Keith]

Best story I ever heard was the Russians ripping off the Intel 8080.
No one there wanted to take the responsibility for even the slightest
change - so they left the Intel logo on it!

The Russians ripped off the B29, right down to the graffiti on some of the
electrical panels.

 

[Mark Zenier]

And Motorola took the 6800 guys to court. So they changed it into 6502 asfaik.

Wow, a whole lot of brain fade going on.

The guys at Motorola who designed the 6800 went off and formed
MOS Technology (an affiliate of Sprague according to the old ads).
(Chuck Peddle was one name that comes to mind. Who later did
the Commodore PET computer, and then the Victor desktop computer).

They (circa 1975)
1: designed a new CPU line, one of which was plug compatible with
the MC6800, the 6501.
2: walked off with some Motorola chip technology (Depletion loads?).

As a consequence of Motorola going after them for #2, #1 (the 6501)
dissappeared, after being on the market for a few months. The not
quite pin compatible 6502 kept on going.

The later (didn't really get out there until 1981) 68000 was more of
a 32 bit extension of the PDP-11, with two banks of 8 32 bit registers.
A much less complex architecture than VAX which had three address
instructions and a zillion address modes. The Ultimate CISC, (unless
you count the iAPX-432).

Mark Zenier [email protected]
Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)

 

[[email protected]]

status, and they assure me it's good and that they are still

soliciting new customers for it. The depletion-load NMOS MC6800 was in
production for over 20 years! Meanwhile, Intel has introduced and
dumped 10 or 20 generations of embedded products, cancelling some just
after samples were available. They just dumped the Xscale stuff, their
version of Arm (or Mips? I forget.)

Would an conclusion that Intel is an unreliable partner for embedded projects
be true based on this info..?

 

[Richard Henry]

How many of you out here have ever discovered that another company had
stolen your designs? As a CM, I have seen it once, and as a hired gun I saw
it once on a complete product scale (although multiple products copied by
this company). I have seen teardowns done, but not cloned. I wonder how
prevalent this is.

We were under subcontract to a prime contractor on a US Navy project to
produce an embedded display controller on tight schedule and volume
constraints. After we got it working, the customer suddenly cancelled out
contract and substituted his own design. Subsequent investigation showed
that their design included a lot that had been disclosed in design reviews.
My lab notebook, design fiels, and contact records became a significant part
of the case.

We sued and "won": they agreed not to do it any more, pay us a little
money, and send us copies of all their engineering documents related to the
project. I don't know if we got the money, but I never saw any of the
design documents.

 

[Stanislaw Flatto]

How many of you out here have ever discovered that another company had
stolen your designs? As a CM, I have seen it once, and as a hired gun I saw
it once on a complete product scale (although multiple products copied by
this company). I have seen teardowns done, but not cloned. I wonder how
prevalent this is.

Relax!
Just look at your immediate surroundings.
You weare clothes designed before Neanderthal times, you boil your
morning coffee on fire domesticated before that, your "proud" vehicle
moves on wheels invented before Pharaos existed, and so on and on.
"What was the question?"

In reality it is rather individual, sometimes it is company assignment,
"If 'they can do it' so can (I)we!" and you learn/investigate/steal what
was done. As usually it is done on working equipment, and in our
proffesion it takes time to have a produced box, your investigation may
be reduced to simple admit that copy is not worth the effort and
designing from scratch will be faster. Been there, done it.
But you and your company have to be rather safe when you declare "Yes,
it can be done!"
Some times the answer IS "Just do it!"
Oh, those times, I still miss them. It was such fun.

Have fun

Stanislaw
Slack user from Ulladulla.

 

[Ken Smith]

Would an conclusion that Intel is an unreliable partner for embedded projects
be true based on this info..?

At least we can say that there was a point at which they did not care
about maintaining a reputation in the embedded market.

What their opinion on the subject today is, I don't know. It doesn't
matter to me because a direct lie they told me some years back got them on
my bad side and on such things I have a very long memory.

 

[[email protected]]

Would an conclusion that Intel is an unreliable partner for embedded projects

At least we can say that there was a point at which they did not care
about maintaining a reputation in the embedded market.

What their opinion on the subject today is, I don't know. It doesn't
matter to me because a direct lie they told me some years back got them on
my bad side and on such things I have a very long memory.

Was that lie stated publicly or in private conversation..?
(ie one can prove they lied)

Anyway the x86 instruction set is a hodgepodge compared to m68k. So it doesn't
matter too much..

 

[Tom Del Rosso]

The Russians ripped off the B29, right down to the graffiti on some
of the electrical panels.

I didn't know that one, but I heard they copied the holes and patches in the
fuselage.

It's really strange since they had three B29s to work from. They didn't all
have the same graffiti and bullet holes, but I guess the people making parts
only had access to one of the originals.

 

[John Fields]

What their opinion on the subject today is, I don't know. It doesn't
matter to me because a direct lie they told me some years back got them on
my bad side and on such things I have a very long memory.

---
Mine too.

Segmented addresses?

Someone at Intel or Microsoft must have been sucking some IBM dick
to make that happen.

 

[Keith]

I didn't know that one, but I heard they copied the holes and patches in the
fuselage.

It's really strange since they had three B29s to work from. They didn't all
have the same graffiti and bullet holes, but I guess the people making parts
only had access to one of the originals.

I thought it was four, but could be wrong. NASM's
_Air_and_Space_Magazine_ had an article on this a couple of years back.
Amazing how inflexible the "engineering" management was.

 

[Tom Del Rosso]

Segmented addresses?

Someone at Intel or Microsoft must have been sucking some IBM dick
to make that happen.

?

Intel came out with the 8086 at least 4 years before the IBM PC.

 

[Roy L. Fuchs]

I thought it was four, but could be wrong. NASM's
_Air_and_Space_Magazine_ had an article on this a couple of years back.
Amazing how inflexible the "engineering" management was.

It was two.

 

[Robert Baer]

I once cloned (different design, functionally equivalent) a LeCroy
product, at the request of one of their customers, and Walter got
fairly annoyed. Next bid, they cut their price in half, so the
customer disqualified them "on technical grounds"!

And Scientific Instruments cloned one of my cryogenic signal
conditioners, but didn't do a good enough job to take much of our
sales away.

In niche markets like mine, it doesn't make sense for a company to
clone somebody else's product just so that they can start a price war
for half of a small market, so we pretty much try to keep out of one
another's way.

I hear that AMD might have once cloned somebody's CPU architecture.

John

I know about what you said; we are also selling a "niche" product,
the replacement to the Victoreen Corotron(TM).
Titan was the "big boy" for a while, but they had no clue to
thermally couple the neg TC part to the pos TC part, which gave the
assembly a thermal hysteresis time constant of about 10 minutes.
And they had no way to mass produce them, as their design required
"tweaking" of a voltage divider.
And..the regulated voltage grossly sagged as the temperature got high.
To top it all off, some units fell apart at high temperature.
Shoot, we even put a patent on improvements to their design into the
public domain.
And despite that, their sales have gone down, probably due to NIH
syndrome.
So it can be a challenge to stay on one's toes with essentially zero
competition.

 

[Tom Del Rosso]

I thought it was four, but could be wrong. NASM's
_Air_and_Space_Magazine_ had an article on this a couple of years
back. Amazing how inflexible the "engineering" management was.

According to the History channel documentary, they had 3, of which they
cannibalized one, kept one for intact study, and kept one in flying
condition to train their own crews.

At a Moscow air show they flew 4 of them in tandem over the crowd, and the
Americans thought it was our planes until the fourth passed.

That documentary also said they had never used synchros before, and that
they had the same premature wear problem with some engine parts.

Russia had a backup team to develop the bomb, so if the first team failed
they could be shot and replaced. I guess that work atmosphere makes people
take orders like "copy the plane" literally.

On the other hand, when they had no choice they did make at least one
change. Their sheet metal rolling machines were metric, so there was no way
to make 1/16th inch aluminum. Somehow they tapered the thickness from one
end of a sheet to the other.