The initial PowerPC port was done by three people: Jes Wills, Andy Giles and Tony Sumpter. When they traveled to Austin, TX to present the work, the AIX software manager who had been in-charge of the ThinkPad Woodfield (6020) effort wanted to know where the rest of the team was. Her team was over 40 people, and they'd taken over 18 months to get to a port.
The Tadpole team for the initial port was 3 people, and had taken six months.
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There was a ritual on the engineering team that you were to drink a "gallon of Abbot" on your 30th (birthday). The gallon, of course, was an Imperial gallon (8 20oz pints, or 4.54 litres. The Abbot was Greene King's Abbot Ale, which is 5% ABC.
You have to start early to get it done, and it still wrecks you.
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The US Navy was very upset that the Tadpole case was made of AZ91D magnesium (alloy). Wouldn't let it on-board anything because Mg + 2H2O → Mg(OH)2 + H2.
Tadpole used it because it has similar density (1.81 g/cm^3, 1.046 lb/in^3) to ABS/PC blend with 20% glass fiber (1.25 g/cm^3), and it has high heat conductivity, so we used the case as a heat sink. AZ91D has an ignition temperature of approximately 468°C (875°F), which is difficult to reach and maintain due to magnesium’s high heat conductivity.
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A magazine (I forget which one) wanted to do a story on how the laptop would stop bullets. So we took a couple dead systems to the local gun range (Red's Indoor Range in Austin, TX) and tried it out. It wouldn't stop a .22, but that didn't stop us from blowing the hell out of the rest with larger calibre firearms. (Several of us were good friends with the people at Red's back then.) Whenever the Brits came over, they wanted to go to Red's, and we were all too willing to take them. The engineering area in Cambridge (England) was decorated with the silhouette targets they took back to show their efforts.
The initial PowerPC port was done by three people: Jes Wills, Andy Giles and Tony Sumpter. When they traveled to Austin, TX to present the work, the AIX software manager who had been in-charge of the ThinkPad Woodfield (6020) effort wanted to know where the rest of the team was. Her team was over 40 people, and they'd taken over 18 months to get to a port.
The Tadpole team for the initial port was 3 people, and had taken six months.
---
There was a ritual on the engineering team that you were to drink a "gallon of Abbot" on your 30th (birthday). The gallon, of course, was an Imperial gallon (8 20oz pints, or 4.54 litres. The Abbot was Greene King's Abbot Ale, which is 5% ABC.
You have to start early to get it done, and it still wrecks you.
---
The US Navy was very upset that the Tadpole case was made of AZ91D magnesium (alloy). Wouldn't let it on-board anything because Mg + 2H2O → Mg(OH)2 + H2.
Tadpole used it because it has similar density (1.81 g/cm^3, 1.046 lb/in^3) to ABS/PC blend with 20% glass fiber (1.25 g/cm^3), and it has high heat conductivity, so we used the case as a heat sink. AZ91D has an ignition temperature of approximately 468°C (875°F), which is difficult to reach and maintain due to magnesium’s high heat conductivity.
---
A magazine (I forget which one) wanted to do a story on how the laptop would stop bullets. So we took a couple dead systems to the local gun range (Red's Indoor Range in Austin, TX) and tried it out. It wouldn't stop a .22, but that didn't stop us from blowing the hell out of the rest with larger calibre firearms. (Several of us were good friends with the people at Red's back then.) Whenever the Brits came over, they wanted to go to Red's, and we were all too willing to take them. The engineering area in Cambridge (England) was decorated with the silhouette targets they took back to show their efforts.
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George Grey (CEO) and Bob Booth (CFO) went on to found and run GeoFox who had a Psion 5 work-alike. (http://www.ericlindsay.com/epoc/geofox.htm). It didn't work out, so George became the President of Psion USA, and then the President and CEO of SavaJe, which became JavaFX Mobile after it was acquired by Sun. Savaje apparently inspired Android. https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/mass-high-tech/2010/...
George and Bob were most recently at Linaro, and are now at foundries.io. Both in the positions they had at Tadpole.