Timeline Analog 4. John Buck

Sony offered for GVG. They asked me to leave and they brought in their own person to manage the company.

      Dan Wright left GVG.

      As he did a young engineer, who helped changed the desktop video landscape, was offered a new challenge.

      Michael Johas Teener was a system architect at National Semiconductor after graduating Caltech in Engineering, where he:

       Learned how to learn, and that it's OK to be a "C" student when you are surrounded by *really* smart people.

      National was assessing ways to approach internal bus architectures.The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), of which National was a member, wanted to merge the existing but incompatible options, VME, NuBus 2, and Futurebus.

      Teener was appointed chair of a project to unify the industry around a single serial bus architecture.

       "Serial" meaning that they transfer one bit at a time, rather than multiple bits simultaneously—parallel is faster, given the same signal frequency, but it comes with a higher overhead and has efficiency problems as you scale up the signal frequencies.

      Around the same time engineer David James, at another IEEE member company Hewlett-Packard, was interested in a new approach. He told Tenner:

       … we want it to go off the bus to connect to low-speed or modest-speed peripherals,' like floppy disks and keyboards and mice and all kinds of other stuff like that.

      Teener left National for Apple as the Macintosh maker was looking for a successor to the Apple Desktop Bus, ADB.

      It wanted the next version to be able to carry audio signals.

      Teener knew what was needed.