by R. Passov
After Steve Jobs hit his VP of development on the forehead, called him a stupid fuck, then stormed out of a meeting that had been set up to see George’s invention, everything changed.
The invention, George said, was on the motherboard. Dell and HP were buying 40 million so that no matter where you were in the world you could grab the local, over-the-air broadcast signal and with a little software, read the signal by the hardware, turning your computer into a TV.
By 2005, Jobs didn’t want anyone reaching out over the air. He wanted everyone to come through the Apple store. Apparently, neither his VP of development or George knew that. On its way toward bankruptcy, CrestaTech ate a fortune.
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Back in the early 1990’s, before one of Sun Microsystems frequent purges forced me out, I shared an office with George and a fellow named Hung Gee. I came to understand something of what George labored on; learning the arc of his career from Daisy Systems – an innovator in microchip design tools – through to Sun where he managed a small corner of the Scalable Processor Architecture or SPARC Chip. As the geometry of microprocessors shrank, electrons traveled shorter distances. The non-intuitive result was to ask less of the hardware (the microprocessor) and more of the software.
Hung Gee was harder to pierce. George believes he can trace Hong Gee’s path to the parking lot of MIPS, another architectural innovator, and to the day in that parking lot when a man with the same name as Hong Gee shot his boss.