Stolen designs

In one early color organ design of mine, I needed a noncritical resistor and the only one I had available at home was an oddball 39 K that nobody ever uses.

An insane number of third praty color organs and psychedelic lighting and dimmer circuits from others ever since placed a 39K resistor in that point in the circuit.

Piracy is the sincerest form of flattery?

I'd have to say a functional equivalent isn't a rip off, though. I have seen medical equipment companies come out with a functional equivalent of a competetors device, like Vital Signs Monitors, that had very similar layouts to where things hooked up, etc. They wanted it that way. But the innards were 100% original (minus OEM module add ons made by a third party). Both engineered their own system. The second group just wanted the layout to be similar as it provided no learning curve for end users of the first device. JMHO, but I could be wrong :(

Meanwhile, Intel has introduced and

There were a bunch of PowerPC processors that fit this category, several versions that never made it after samples were sent and designs made around them.

Some of mine are in very inaccessible places and no market to make more. I LOVE jobs that are one-of-a-kind!

If I had access to some of the competitors gadgets that competed with things I had designed, maybe I would have seen more. But forking out BIG money just to see that is not gonna happen. Being a hired gun all that time, I rarely stayed in the same market area for long. I have never been asked to formally reverse engineer something and never had time to do it on my own. My usual contracts were getting something out the door after marketing and engineering had battled it out too long, fixing "show stoppers", or designing all new systems.

I reverse-engineer stuff all the time. Likewise I collect schematics of test gear etc. you never know when you might come across an idea worth stealing :)

more often though, the trick is to figure out the underlying principles of any "nice" circuit, then apply those principles to your thing.

Cheers Terry

Ro

I think you're misinformed. Both Intel and AMD admit AMD was a bit slow on the techonology-transfer to Intel. Not necessarily preventable.

No, AMD had and has the rights to Intel microcode, all the way to the latest Pentium instructions. If you look hard enough, Intel admits this.

It's not necessarily 'piracy' in the sense of being illegal. I've had several innovative designs copied, mostly by small garage shops who could turn an apparent profit by cutting corners on tooling and copying circuits directly. A couple others were new ideas for new markets and the functionality was emulated, without being a direct copy. That's actually more irritating. Oh, and I had an A****n Instrument guy bitch to me at a trade show about a funcional equivalent that I'd designed. Sorry, the customer asked for it. Seemed they'd heard that before (probably because they charged really, really high prices for something a good instrument design engineer could do over a coffee, on a paper napkin).

If you publish schematics your designs will be copied whether or not they are any good.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Have you ever looked at a Tektronix RM529 and a HP 191 Waveform Monitor, side by side? Look at the rear panel. the connectors are placed to make the HP a drop-in replacement for the original RM529. The early CCU consoles were pre wired, and it would take a lot of time to slit all the lacing cord and replace the cables to fit a different footprint.

Mostek developed the 6502 as a low cost processor to compete with the

Rockwell and about a dozen other companies were second source for the

Make that MOS Technology!

Did you ever look at the PC boards in any of the early home C-band Sat TV receivers? Several companies were calling each other thieves, but they all copied the design from a Radio Electronics magazine article.

I like doing the impossible, as well. My boss walked up to my bench one day and asked if I would keep my eye out for a cheap, used 10 MHz DA for the in house frequency standard. I laughed and told him I had one in the back of my truck. Actually, it was a A/B switcher for selecting one of a pair of minicomputers to multiple RGB color monitors that had 32 outputs buffered with LH0002 chips. A half hour of rewiring and I had a

The NMOS 6800 was introduced at the bargain price of US $395 per chip (back when that was not a bad week's wage) and required a nasty dual-phase rail-to-rail (not TTL, it had to swing to within 250mV of each rail fairly snappily) external clock circuit.

The 6502 was introduced at a much lower price ($20?), and had (IMHO) a bit better architecture including dual pointers for efficient block moves and a single phase TTL-input clock. It retained stuff like the overflow flag which Motorola latter snipped out of the cheaper 6805 and almost totally snipped down 6804.

The 6501, which some people apparently are half-remembering, was a version of the MOS Technology 6502 wot was pin-compatible with the

I believe both the NMOS 6800 and the NMOS 6502 were dynamic (they had a minimum clock frequency).

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

I think it was the Tek 545 'scope that another company (Dumont? maybe someone else) _copied_ (down to the number of turns on the power transformer -- a hack-sawed Tek transformer was part of the evidence IIRC), and sold to the US military. Decades later, Tek finally got compensated for the loss of sales.

The time, expense, and effort required to reach any legal settlement for these kinds of activities makes me very glad to be an engineer!

-f

They used different mnemonics, so an ordinary jury would toss out any infringement case. All the defense would have to say is, "Look, they use a completely different programming language! How can this be a "copy"?" ;-)

Cheers! Rich

That's the problem when you "win" a case - you get a nice court order, then you still have the task of extracting the money (and, apparently, whatever else you've been "awarded") from the thief.

Thanks, Rich

Maybe they were hanging around with the folks in their Data Processing division and read a Univac 1100 manual, which has a very similar segmentation system. Intel was a big Univac user at that time, and even had a software division that sold some database software they had written. The Semi companies were a lot closer to the big iron DP manufacturers in those days. National even had a division that made clones of IBM 370 mainframes.

Microsoft was a half a dozen guys eating Pizza in Albuquerque, and IBM was in full "we invent everything we need" mode back when the 8086 was cooked up.

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)

Freescale (or Motorola before that) have wanted to EOL the 68332 for years - it can't be made in their more modern lines, because the process is to old. They tried to persuade customers to move to the MPC5xx line (Power PC core, improved TPU), arranging prices to help, but the 68332 is as popular as ever.

If you ever feel you want to move on, go for the ColdFire MCF523x line. You get a lot more for your money (eTPU, Ethernet, 150 MHz, etc.), and the ColdFire core is based on the same ISA as the 68332. Even programming in assembly, there will not be many changes needed to your code.