Moral: Awesome productivity happens when IP doesn't get in the way.

While my PoV is US centered, I feel that other nations should largely optimize for the same as much as possible. Many of today's issues stem from too much centralization of commercial/corporatist power as opposed to fostering competition. This shouldn't be in the absence of a baseline of reasonable regulation, just optimizing towards what is best for the most people.

- Mario Puzo, The Godfather

> The processor was reverse-engineered by Ashawna Hailey, Kim Hailey and Jay Kumar. The Haileys photographed a pre-production sample Intel 8080 on their last day in Xerox, and developed a schematic and logic diagrams from the ~400 images.

Definitely read that wrong the first time I skimmed the article

Those worked in 4-bit slices, and you could use them as LEGO blocks to build your own design (e.g. 8, 12 ou 16 bits) with much fewer parts than using standard TTL gates (or ECL NANDs, if you were Seymour Cray).

The 1980 Mick & Brick book Bit-slice Microprocessor Design later gathered together some "application notes" - the cookbooks/crib sheets that semiconductor companies wrote and provided to get buyers/engineers started after the spec sheets.

instant 20% speed boost replacing the IBM 8088 with the v20 chip

bought a sleeve of them cheap and went around to all the PCs and popped them out

only problem was software that relied on clocks ran too fast

Apparently by ripping off their military customers.

>says Wikipedia.

Why is that a primary source?