• Established internal ASIC design capability within SuperMac by creating the IC Design Group as Director of IC Technology
• Oversaw the design of a number of graphics ASICs for SuperMac’s Computer Graphics products
• Named Director of Graphics Products and oversaw the development of a variety of Apple NUBUS based color graphics boards
• Worked with Storm Technologies to develop ThunderStorm video compression board
• Patented a lossless compression technique for graphics data intended for use on Rambus channels to improve performance and lower power dissipation, also patented a technique to dynamically apply color purity correction to an RGB display raster beam to improve color quality and CRT monitor manufacturing yield
• Attended the Stanford Executive program – had lunch with Edward Teller

I left the Apple Newton project in August of 1990 to join SuperMac, reporting to Brian Apgar (VP Engineering). SuperMac was part of the Macintosh peripherals supplier ecosystem at (another supplier was Radius), delivering a variety of products to the market including hard drives, monitors, and graphics boards. Prior to that time their chip design capabilities were limited mainly to outsourcing to third parties such as SEI (Silicon Engineering Inc). I was hired to bring the know-how I had acquired during my seven years at Apple to bootstrap SuperMac’s internal ASIC design capability – which included everything from compute hardware, to EDA tools, to methodology.

During my tenure at SuperMac I came to know some great people, including Steve Blank (VP Marketing, who has since gone on to be a noted author and lecturer on entrepreneurship and innovation), Peter Barrett (co-founder of Rocket Science games and a WebTV Fellow), David Foster (Amazon Lab 126), Jay Torborg, Mark Housley, and Lou Doctor.

At SuperMac I had my first (and so far only) IPO experience as an employee.

My role grew to include Director of Graphics Products, which included delivering the ASICs that were the heart of the Thunder line of graphics boards, which were the main revenue generator for the company. The primary chip implementation approach used by SuperMac were Gate Arrays built by LSI Logic with some chips also built for us by Toshiba.

I started a based graphics card development that used Rambus RDRAMs where Toshiba was the RDRAM supplier. This product did not ship before SuperMac was to merge with Radius. However, the exposure to the Rambus ecosystem was to create a path for my next startup experience, which was at Chromatic Research, see: CHROMATIC-RESEARCH

In the early ’90s, color graphics, especially full 24-bit color was just starting to penetrate the market, and color pre-press and color publishing markets were willing to pay a lot of money for boards and monitors that could be color calibrated (SuperMac supplied such a calibration system). We could sell NUBUS plug-in add-in boards for $3K. Those were the days . . .

Why Did I Leave SuperMac?

It was becoming clear that, rather than trying to encourage a vibrant ecosystem, Apple preferred to expand both horizontally and vertically, and in the process “eat its young”. The first manifestation of this was consolidation in the Apple peripherals ecosystem, including the forced marriage of SuperMac and Radius. I had been in discussions with the CEO and Chairman (Larry Finch of Sigma Partners) of SuperMac to create a “Commercial Silicon Group” which I later tried to spin out as an independent product company, but these discussions did not converge in part because of the pending merger with Radius, which occurred a couple of months after my departure. The spin out company had plans for several graphics related chips, both of which would use RAMBUS memory.

(A Few) MEMORIES:

• I remember installing and maintaining an Ethernet network in Engineering. It used the old multi-drop single cable with vampire taps. It was (of course) unreliable, as soon as someone moved a cube or jostled the cable, the net would go down
• I remember engineers making heroic efforts routing Xilinx FPGA’s by hand to try to get Digital Film and other projects working
• SuperMac sponsored me for a two week Stanford Engineering Executive program. Lots of lectures by Stanford and Harvard biz school profs. An occasional field trip. As I mentioned above, I remember lunch with Edward Teller as the guest of honor. I sat in the table next to him not far away and remember him loudly proclaiming the supposed negative global warming effects of fossil fuel related CO2 omissions as “nonsense”. As I was not at all a fan of what he did to J. Robert Oppenheimer during the McCarthy communist witch hunt era, I had pretty mixed feelings about listening to Edward.

SuperMac Slide Show:

1. Patent:  Dynamic Purity Correction
2. Patent:  Cell Based Image Correction
3. SuperMac QuickDraw Accelerator Chip (SQUID)
4. SuperMac RGB RAMDAC Chip (DAC01)
5. SuperMac 2D Graphics Accelerator Chip (SMT02)
6. RAMDAC Bit Shift Register Chip (BSR03)
7. SuperMac RGB Graphics Board 1993
8. SuperMac ThunderStorm Video Accelerator Daughter Board
9. SuperMac Thunder II GX RGB Graphics Board
10. SuperMac Spectrum 8×24 RGB Graphics Board
11. SuperMac DataFrame 150MB Hard Disk Drive (HDD)