 "The Color Computer" |
• Bill designed about 80% of the so called "color computer," including two VLSI chips. • Keywords: PC, Hardware, MC6847, VDG, MC6883, SAM, MC6809. • Amazingly, the Coco still has a number of active special interest groups. * Coco is a contraction for "color computer". |
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• The Coco was "Motorola's" first high volume computer. • Motorola supplied nearly 100% of the silicon components in the Coco: Highly profitable, volume sales. • The Coco's novel design used a unique MC6809E CPU (which very nearly became the CPU in the IBM PC). |
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Leadership / Management • Bill led the entire Coco project (Motorola's role). Theory / R&D • Bill's experience designing DRAM controllers (MC6883) and video display chips (MC6847) enabled the Coco. • This includes Bill’s numerous insights in hardware design (CMOS design, pipelining, memory architectures, video standards, NTSC, PAL, SECAM, ALUs and microcode). • Bill proposed and prototyped analog joysticks. Software • Bill directed software development for testing and for demonstrating the Coco. • Bill architected special test software and supporting hardware for the initial chip "bring up" for the MC6883 which served as a system-integration chip for the Coco. Hardware • Bill designed all of the logic in the MC6883 and MC6847, and their integration with the CPU (all, except the mass storage interface). |
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Patent (4, 670, 745 Issued 06 - 02 -1987) Patent (4, 675, 666 Issued 06 - 23 -1987) Current Owner: Motorola, Inc. Licensing availability: (Please contact Motorola). Contact Info: motorolaventures@motorola.com |
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By pushing beyond the current state-of-the-art, there are these opportunities: • Although Windows PCs have dominated for years, their high power consumption and high silicon complexity have severely slowed the progress of battery-efficient, low-cost, portable applications. • As the Coco design demonstrated, fresh re-thinking of the system, as a whole, can make enormous simplifications, thereby driving down battery-drain and costs (e.g. See the Negroponte $100 laptop per child project). |
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• Patent 4670745 • Patent 4675666 |
