Back to Part 1

RW: Well anyway, in `74 you started Zilog?

FF: Yes.

RW: What motivated you to start a company?

FF: Well, in silicon valley, you know, you have to start a company unless your manhood is going to be questioned right? Well, seriously, the... it was not one reason, there were several reasons. Among them, I had worked very hard at Intel for about... almost five years and I had grown professionally quite a lot. In fact, by the time I left, I had eighty people in my department. I had more than half of the overall R&D of Intel, which at that point was already a large company. It was about... they were... in `74 they did about $135 million of revenues which was a lot in those days.

So, I had more than half of the R&D at Intel reporting to me. But, you know, I did not have the satisfaction that I was expecting--economical satisfaction--but not having been one of the early guys, I did not have a lot of stock and the company had, you know, a reasonable amount of stock but not very much. And the company was getting too big for my taste and it was getting a little too... Andy was beginning to become the man in charge and there were sign-up sheets where, you know, you had to sign-up if you arrive after eight o'clock, and the environment was no longer the environment that I really liked to be part of.

So I decided that it was time for me to go, time for me to leave, that I could start a company and work as hard and have a lot more satisfaction and having an environment that would be much more to my liking as opposed to having to sort of, you know, to be felt like you were subjugated there. So that's how I did it.

RW: Well, I noticed that change at Intel in the culture. It used to be that when Noyce was very active in the company, there would be a meeting and Andy Grove would start off on one of his diatribes and Noyce would say, "Andy, shut-up." And that was sort of the end of it. So he was able to hold him in check and then as Noyce semi-retired and became vice-chairman, a lot of the decency went out of the company. Because Noyce and Moore are just such... Noyce was and Moore is.. such gentlemen and such, you know, brilliant but people... wonderful people that you would just love to be around. Gordon Moore never says anything dumb. I don't know if you noticed that.

FF: Yeah.

RW: He doesn't say much but whatever he says is either very funny or...

FF: ... very cogent.

RW: ... right on the mark. He will sit through a meeting and not say anything and then he'll make, you know, one comment which just sums it right up. And I really... I really appreciated that.

Well anyway, so you started Zilog in '74.

FF: Yeah, at the end of `74, yeah.

RW: And there was no venture capital money to speak of in those days, was there?

FF: No. The industry was just... had entered a recession, as you remember. In fact, that recession lasted for most of 1975 and venture capitals had disappeared from the scene after having overdone it in the late sixties.

As you remember, in the late sixties, there were a rash of electronics companies that had started. Typically things go in cycles and that was a trough of a cycle. But we were lucky enough--and I say "we", because I started the company with one of the managers that working for me at Intel, Ralph Ungerman--so he and I were the co-founders of Zilog. And when we began to decide what we going to do and so on, was about the same time that we got a phone call from Exxon Enterprises. Exxon, the oil company, had a venture capital subsidiary that was playing in the venture capital... was interested in creating a new possible business for Exxon Corporation for the year 2000, and they had recognized information technology as one of the major technologies that could give the momentum needed for, you know... to have something that was commensurate with the oil business.

And there was an article that appeared in Electronics News about "Faggin and Ungerman leaving Intel to start their own firm," and it caught the eye of someone at Exxon Enterprises so I got a call. And they asked me if I was interested in some money and I said, "Well, not really, I mean, we still haven't figured out what we want to do but, you know, if you come around in the area, give us a call and we'll... I certainly would like to chat." (Laughs)

I didn't know that that was probably the right way to attract Exxon Enterprises but at any rate, they showed up two weeks later and by that time we had already, you know... we had a more clear idea what we wanted to do. At that time, what I wanted to do was a single-chip microcontroller--what later became the Z8 for Zilog. And so we described what we were interested in doing and so on and we started the dialog and it ended up in their investing in the company in June of `75. So it took, you know, about six or seven months of negotiation and back and forth but eventually they invested in the company. They put half a million dollars in Zilog which turns out to have been 5% of the total venture capital investment in 1975 in this country. Only $10 million were invested by venture capital in this year... that's what I read in statistics. Compared to, I don't know, probably a couple of billion dollars last year.

So we started with that money and, in fact, we were in the market having spent about $400,000 of their money having developed the Z80 microprocessor, the development system, and all the software required to really bring to bear the... our new offering. In those days you could do a lot more with $400,000 than you can do today.

RW: Hm ... Well, you didn't have to build your own fab.

FF: No. We didn't have to build our own fab, but, you now, but even... even for a design team of developing a system, basically a computer system, all the software, and a chip that was state of the art in those days, it was still a very small amount of money.

RW: What was the reaction at Intel when you left? You said you were...

FF: Well, they were not pleased to say the least, they certainly valued my presence but, of course, you know, I was pretty set to go and there was nothing they could say or do that would change my mind. Andy even... you know... when I left... when I had my sort of "exit interview," ...no actually, he was still trying to make me stay, but he intimated that I would leave no heritage to my children if I leave Intel... [Laughs] So it was an interesting kind of a conversation.

But my mind was on creating a microprocessor company. Intel still, in '74, was a memory company. Microprocessors always were taking second... second best... and I felt not appreciated, frankly, at Intel... so... maybe they did appreciate me but they were certainly not demonstrating that. Although I got promotions, in fact, what I did I ended up working more for them and doing more for them, so it was not the kind of environment that I wanted to stick around with. So there was no way that they could dissuade me to leave and Gordon tried and also... and I was pretty set and that was it.

RW: Well, the Z80 was an immediate success.

FF: Yes, it was. The Z80, believe it or not, is still in high-volume production today. It's one of the few products that is still enduring... I understand that over a billion Z80s have been built already.

RW: Well, it's a cell as well, or a megacell.

FF: It's a megacell. Now, of course, you hardly buy the Z80 by itself. You buy it as part of an integrated solution, but I would guess that even today there are probably thirty or forty or fifty million units, you know, built a year by many sources. But it was recognized very early that it was going to overcome the 8080. In fact, I have here, looking over my sold stuff, I found this cartoon. It was on a German magazine and it shows the Z80 conquering the bastion of the 8080, and on the background there are the Exxon tanks and oil towers... [Laughs] It's kind of an interesting portrayal of what really was going on in '76-77. The Z80 was the dominant microprocessor and had taken the market by storm.

As I said, still today, it's a major seller. In fact, you have a picture here of the Z80. Thank you. That shows the layout of the Z80 and you can see the... this, of course, is a hand-made design like the 4004 was. But you can see the difference in complexity. The Z80 was about ten times more transistors more than the... ah, no, sorry, five, six times more transistors than the 4004--five years later. And you can see that the, you know, the 4004 is more like, you know, a portion of it. So, it was a sophisticated microprocessor for those days. Of course, today it's a joke, it's a little thing compared to a Pentium or, god forbid, the P6 and what have you.

But, of course, there is a time for everything and in those days this was the best that could be done. This layout was done all by hand and I actually drew--my own hands--two-thirds of this. So this is a...

RW: Don't try that with two million transistors!

[Laughter.]

FF: Of course, it's impossible today. Without computers you couldn't design the chips that technology can build these days.

RW: Well, then there was the Z8000...

FF: Yeah, then there was the Z8 and then the Z8000. The Z8 was built... right after we finished the Z80, we started the Z8 project, and a few months after that the Z8000. And the Z8000 was a 16/32-bit microprocessor that was supposed to really create the new wave of the industry. And it almost made it but not quite... [Laughs.]

RW: Well, yes, and I was at Intel at that time and the 6800 and the Z8000...

FF: Yup. The 68000 you mean?

RW: The Z8.

FF: No, the 68000.

RW: 68000, yes, I'm sorry, and the Z8000 struck fear into the hearts of Intel because the "great leap forward," the 432, was an utter failure and the 8086 had been clobbered together and was generally perceived as a poor third in... quality and performance.

FF: Well, in fact, even the chip size of the Z8000 was less than the 8086. It was actually a very, very cost-effective microprocessor. It was much smaller than the 68000, for example, in terms of chip area so it could be prod... much more producible. But as history showed, that was not enough. There were other forces playing in the marketplace in those days and whatever happened... no.

RW: What is your take on the decision of IBM to use the 8086? I've heard so many different stories...

FF: Yeah, well one factor which is not recognized at all because, of course, things tend to be forgotten and not seen in the proper perspective, is that a lot of the decision of IBM to go with Intel was a political decision--because of Exxon. Exxon had declared war, basically, to IBM. As you remember in '78, '79, Exxon went out of the closet parading their companies, you know, Vilo... [unintelligible]... equipment, Zilog and their ads, you know, on the Wall Street Journal and Business Week, and so on, about the foray of Exxon Enterprises and Exxon Corporation into the information age, and information business. And, you know, sort of "Watch out, IBM, here we come," and here are point of attacks into this business.

And IBM wasn't going to give business to Zilog. In fact, they had an internal edict not to use Zilog products because of the affiliation with Exxon. So we basically were not in the running because of political reasons, and that is not understood. Intel, in fact, they did not think... they did know they were going to get the IBM order but, in fact, they got it because there was no other way. It was, you know, either Motorola--Motorola was too risky, the chip was too big, it was too new, there was not enough history that it could be producible in volume--or Intel because Zilog was not even to be counted.

RW: Well I also heard that the 68000 was too powerful and would have impinged on the minicomputer business of IBM's, so that they felt using the 8088, which is kind of crippled, that it wouldn't be too powerful.

FF: Well, but also there were issues... you now, a decision is never made because of one reason, right, in general? There were other issues like availability of peripheral components, and because... that's why they used the 8088 instead of the 8086 early on because Intel was not ready with all these 16-bit peripherals anyway, so they had to use 8-bit peripherals which were already available. The... Motorola had the big mother, but it didn't have the peripheral components required, so there wasn't enough to build a computer with, just with the 68000. And so that's another of many reasons why IBM presumably went with Intel. Of course, you should ask them... [Laughs.]

Although even many of the people that were involved are probably gone, god knows where, even at IBM and so. And the main guy died in an accident...

RW: In a plane accident.

FF: Yeah, that's right.

RW: Well, there was at that time... there was a group of salesmen, salespeople came to Intel management and said, "We are in serious, serious trouble," so there was started something called "Operation CRUSH," and the idea was if we could somehow get the 68000, the Z8000 would be crushed between...

FF: Yup, between, yup.

RW: And there was all sorts of various schemes used in Operation CRUSH... promotions and ads and so many things. But what really proved to be the most effective was Bob Noyce going out and laying out the future of the x86, the 186, the 286 and so while the 8086 wasn't very much, frankly, customers like Olivetti... I know he turned Olivetti around... they saw this road map into the future which would lead to a leadership...compatible... program compatible leadership position and that and then of course the IBM decision swung...

FF: Yeah, that was it. I mean, the IBM decision was the "crush." [Laughs.]

RW: Yeah. It would be interesting to speculate had they chosen something else. What would Intel be today? A much smaller company I would think...

FF: Absolutely, Or had we had different investors? Had I been a little more experienced in, you know instead of being 32 years old, if I had been 40 years old when I started Zilog or something... but who cares? The way things went, they went the way they went!

RW: Well then, eventually you left Zilog to start yet another company. What was your motivation to do that

FF: Ah, yeah. Well, the motivation was that I could see no way to succeed with Exxon, basically. As I mentioned earlier, Exxon decided--I think they had decided all along there were going to do this, but they certainly did not tell me that they decided to go after IBM and to create this, you know, huge empire in information of which Zilog was a piece of it. And that was not what I intended. I mean, what I intended was to have a company that would go public, and like any other company in silicon valley, and be dedicated to one thing, which was microprocessors. But because Exxon had the majority of the stock... in fact, they were the only investor in the company and they wanted to stay that way from very early, and I did not... and that's one area of inexperience on my part.

I saw some level of danger of that but I sort of wanted to believe that they were going to honor the, you know, the desire of the founders to go public, but it turned out not to be the case. So, I grew very tired of that situation. I tried very hard to have them sell their interest in Zilog to other companies for which Zilog was much more of a fit. But they wouldn't hear of it and so after a couple of years of trying, I said, "That's it." I mean, I was spending more time in New York than I was spending in the marketplace. I was basically fighting Exxon, instead of fighting, you know, fighting the war out there. And that is how also Intel got it easy, because of this internal situation at Zilog that had gotten very difficult to manage.

RW: Similar to Shlumberger's acquisition of Fairchild. You know, destructive.

FF: I would say that it's one of many examples. In fact, look at United Technologies and Mostek. They managed to destroy the old company. Honeywell and Synertek: they destroyed that company. Shlumberger and Fairchild: they destroyed that company. And I have to say that I'm actually proud that Exxon did not destroy Zilog, because Zilog is still alive and kicking and is the only company that has survived this... from the Exxon empire. Exxon had started at least two dozen companies. They managed to destroy every single one of them.

RW: Yes.

FF: And Zilog is the only one that is still alive and still doing products which are Z80s and Z8s which was the early stuff that I did when they company started, so I feel actually quite good about that.

RW: So what was your next company?

FF: The next company was called Cygnet Technologies, and the idea behind that company was to create a voice and data workstation for the manager, typically. Because the manager is the person that communicates and wants data/text and voice at his desk. By developing the other half of the voice and data workstation--which was the communication portion. So we developed what was called the "communication co-system," which was basically in appearance like a telephone, an intelligent telephone, connected with the personal computer, and the combination if the two would give an environment which was a communication environment and computation environment.

For example, I could call you with the co-system in the PC, push a button, and transfer to your PC the screen that I had in my PC, now both of you could talk about what I had in my screen. I could also, for example, create electronic mail, send it to a number of people in the world by timing the delivery that electronic mail would be sent. And the mail would be sent automatically by the co-system using commercial phone lines directly to your co-system.

So you would have a light on in your PC/co-system combination telling you that you got mail, and then you would read the mail, and so on. So, it was electronic mail without a central host computer, done directly, managed directly by each station. It was a very innovative product, but it did not go. Basically, we sold 5,000 systems the first year. We needed to sell about 15,000 to really take off. And it was a pity because it was a good product, but we ended up introducing the product just a few months after the AT&T was, you know, the de-regulation of the telecommunication industry. Everybody was confused, there were people that did not want to buy anything that was telecommunication. That was early `84 and so there was a lot of foot-dragging by the people... by our market...because we needed to sell that as a system and so we needed to sell that to the basic communication guru of a company, or czar of a company, and people did not want to talk to us basically.

RW: Now here in 1995, this is just starting to catch on. So you were ten years ahead.

FF: Yeah. But, of course, you know, it doesn't give you any good feeling to be ten years ahead. The idea is to be just right on time... but at any rate, the product is still in use by... many of the networks that were built with our product, are still using it today because they find it very useful, very useful... It had, for example, all the software for keeping your calendar. For example, it would beep you when you had an appointment. Supposedly congress said "Call Rob." And then I would simply push the button, and it would call you automatically because the counter was linked with the directory and it would call you immediately.

RW: Just like today.

FF: Yeah, just like you can do today, and this was in '84. So it was a very advanced product for the day, both in hardware and software. But, as I said, it was too early and... we almost made it but not quite... we just... we just did not get into the self-regenerative, you know, you have to have enough business that you begin to pay the bills and get enough left over to create the next product and we quite not made it to even pay the bills, so we basically ended up having to sell the company. The company was sold and I started a new company.

RW: So, in '86 you started your third company.

FF: Yes, called "Synaptics." And this company was from the very beginning, intended to be very different than my prior two experiences. The idea was to develop a basic technology first, and then take it from there and go to market. But the first six years of the company, myself, and my partner, which is Professor Carver Mead of Caltech, focused our attention to developing basic technology for pattern recognition.

Well, Synaptics' idea was to combine together two emerging technologies that were just beginning. One was neural networks and the other one was adaptive analog VLSI. Let me say a few words about those technologies. Neural networks are basically structures similar to the biological neurons that we have in our head that are appropriate to do tasks that are very difficult for computers like pattern recognition, speech recognition, and writing recognition. All those very difficult tasks which AI--Artificial Intelligence--had promised they would solve "next year," and they had kept that promise but ... never delivered.

RW: It's always "next year."

FF: It's always a promise. So we decided that perhaps there is a way now that.. . sufficient knowledge existed on... although very primitive still...that sufficient knowledge exists on how the brain processes information, that perhaps if we use structures which we know work when it comes to pattern recognition, because we can recognize handwriting, and we can certainly recognize complex objects and faces and speech. Maybe there is a chance...

The other thing was to implement that structure, we needed a technology that was much more computationally dense that digital and also much closer to the sensory side, which is also analog. And that was the work that Carver Mead had done at Caltech on his silicon retina, his silicon cochlea and so on. And I felt that that technology combined with neural networks could provide a uniqueness for us to go after the market.

But, of course, we didn't know. Both of us didn't know what could be done because the things that could be done in '86 when I started this company, were very primitive things. Basically we could solve toy problems, we couldn't solve... no real problems. But six years later, with just four or five bright young kids from university... just right out of university... we had enough technology that we could begin to solve real problems and so we started working on our first product which was introduced about six months go... yeah, about... by Fall Comdex last year, which we call the "Touch Pad."

And here is our product. [Picking up touchpad.] It's a... it's basically a touch-sensing pad that recognizes the position of the finger and also the pressure of the finger... this is on one side. On the other side, of course, is the electronics that controls that. There's a chip that we have developed which is a mixed-signal device. Analog because, you know, capacitance are [is an] analog entity. And then digital on the other side because computers are digital. So you need both technologies. You need to convert human-generated signals which are analog and continuous into digital which are the signals the computers understand.

There is a microcontroller here which is about a Z80 kind of machine. It's not a Z80 but it's that kind of class machine, with firmware which is firmware we have developed to do this thing. And basically with this device, you have X, Y and Z coordinates, both absolute and relative, so it performs both as a pressure-sensitive tablet as well as a pointing device. And the first target market is to replace trackballs and track points in notebook computers. And we have been already quite successful. We have already a dozen companies that have adopted these and they're just coming out in the market right now.

With this pad, you can move your finger and just tap. And basically you have moved the cursor and activated the, you know, the icon, the window, whatever you want to do. You can double-tap, you can click-and-drag, you can do gestures on it, you don't need any buttons. And, of course, if you are in tablet mode, you can write with your finger or with a pen... we have a special pen which... you can write on it.

For example, you could create a fax and then you sign directly on this pad so that now you can send the fax with your fax/modem with both the text and your signature captured by this device.

You can, you know... we have a brush... that you can paint on it. And the more you press the brush, the bigger the area of contact and therefore, the wider the brush stroke, so that you can actually paint with ... an object like this. Of course, if you want to paint seriously, you need something larger than this. This is just for the, you know, for a...basically as a pointing device and also as an entry device. Like in the far east, people are very excited about this because you can write Chinese characters on it...

RW: Kanji...

FF: And you write one character at a time anyway, so this is all you need for that purpose. So, this is the first application of the neural network and neural system technology that we have developed, and also the hardware technology that we have developed because this device is adaptive. In other words, it tracks the user. If you use this little finger, of course it's different than if you use this large finger, and so on. And so, it adapts to the user. It does collective computation and it does parallel computation in order to minimize the effect of noise, because, you know, in your finger you have bout 80 volts at 60Hz, if you're in a room like this and you can only sense millivolts to sense capacitances. And so, you basically have a noise problem which is not insignificant and so only through techniques of parallel computation and collective computation can we get reliable signals.

So this is an example of a technology that we have developed. We have much more sophisticated technology, as technology goes. For example, in recognition... image recognition, where you can recognize faces or hands. You can tell where the hand is in a complex picture like a picture you're taking right now with background things move in... we can tell where the hand is, whether the hand is closed or open... with high accuracy.

We also work in sound and handwriting recognition. We have a handwriting recognition software now for pen entry which is a factor of five better than the best in the business using neural network technology.

So, the big.. the fruits of this long labor are beginning to come due now. The harvest is coming... So we're quite excited about it and the company is just taking off and we should be profitable in a few months and we're, you know, we're on our way...

RW: It's very rare that a startup company can have that long a time horizon.

FF: Yes. I think that without the pedigree of Carver Mead and myself it would have been impossible, you know. Venture capital are not patient guys, as you know. And, but we told them early on, "Look we won't spend a lot of money, but it will take time," and we ended up building all this technology for which we have over forty patents, building our first product, and all the technology that we had behind which, you know I have no time to explain... with less than $7 million. And we got another round of financing basically, when we... after the announcement of the first product... of this touchpad.

RW: So how many VCs [Venture Capitalists] do you have?

FF: Ah, we have four, five VCs.

RW: They're all local?

FF: Yeah, we have Connor-Perkins, TDI, Sprout, Dolp... [unintelligible]... Venture, and Oak Partners. In the last round of financing, National Semiconductor came in as a major partner because we made an alliance as well so now we also have a business partner as well.

RW: And will they fab the parts for you?

FF: Ah, if necessary. Right now we're using external foundries, but certainly a lot of the reason for this alliance is the manufacturing muscle that they can bring to bear on this. But they like our technology. We have a number of projects that we are working together with, where they can develop products around the basic technology that is embodied here and other technology that were not disclosing at this point. So, they themselves are going to be able to develop a number of new products that are enabled by our technology and that's good. And we are really working very closely together and it's a good relationship.

RW: Well, you started three companies, now. What does it take to be an entrepreneur? I mean, what qualities?

FF: Well, first, lots of physical strength. [Laughs.] If you... you have to have many qualities. The most important one, I would think, is the desire to create a new company. In other words, just the bare desire of doing something new in terms of organizational structure, something that goes after a specific opportunity in the marketplace, some idea about a culture that you want in the company, so this sort of Gestalt and the desire to create this thing. That is the most important aspect of an entrepreneur. Because it's really... it's almost like creating your own family, a new family, you know. You leave a place and you say, "OK, I'll create a new nest over here." And you have to have an image in your head of what you want. The type of people that you want...

RW: You get to... you don't have to repeat the mistakes.

FF: Of course, you get to do it better the next time, right? The other thing is that you have to have, and I was not completely joking earlier, you have to have a lot of strength, emotional strength and physical strength because the early years of a company are fun, but they're also hard work.

RW: A lot of hours...

FF: Lots of hours. And you have to have also a family which is quite supportive of what you're doing and I'm actually quite happy that my wife has been always supporting me. But certainly one sacrifice that I had to make, and I also had to make but it was my choice, it wasn't their choice, is to you know, not to be at home very much. And so my children could have standed seeing me more often, so that is not something that is good but it goes with the territory. So without a family which is supportive, you know, one would find himself either divorced or would find himself in a trap where one could not dedicate the energy to work at the same time having been unhappy... in an unhappy family... So that is an aspect that seldom goes acknowledged, but I think is important to acknowledge because certainly my kid has been very important... my wife, Alvia, was very supportive of me, and has endured a lot loneliness because of that.

RW: I hate to travel.

FF: Yeah.

RW: That's what... that's my big problem. I've never been a CEO, never wanted to, because you have to be like the president of the United States. You have to be not only a manager and a leader but then you have symbolic things... and calling on customers...I just didn't care for that.

FF: It's a very demanding job because it demands... you know, you have to be good just about everywhere. You cannot be a C, a C- student in any subject, I mean you have to be, you know, an A or a B student everywhere and that sometimes is difficult, because the world we live in is very complex. You have to be very good in technology, you have to be very good in marketing and sales, you have to be very good in manufacturing, you have to be very good in finance, you have to know how to present yourself, you have to be a good speaker, a good charismatic figure, and all that is not easy to do.

RW: Yeah. Well, you also have to be prepared to fail.

FF: And that's harder to do. [Laughs.]

RW: Are the Japanese... not prepared to fail? ...

FF: Most people are not prepared to fail. That goes with the territory. You try new things, you can fail.

RW: Well, that's why... one of reasons there are so few Japanese start-ups, I think... Well, thank you Federico, this has been great fun.

FF: Yeah, thank you... really appreciate going back to the old days... I still remember the days of Fairchild with the big computer clicking on the raised floor and doing not much more work than actually a Z80 was doing twenty years ago.

RW: It was an IBM 360/44 and it was about 0.7 MIPS...

FF: Yeah, unbelievable. I still remember punching cards and feeding this card reader, and then fighting every minute with that stupid machine, because, you know, the human interface in those days was so awful.

RW: Yeah.

FF: And now we can begin to, you know, with this thing [trackpad] and with neural networks, we can begin to create human interfaces that are like humans. In other words, here I'm just touching [touching trackpad]... I'm touching a machine basically... I'm brushing lightly on the machine like you would touch skin, and we have means of machines looking at me and recognizing me, recognizing if I smile, if I frown. And we have means to recognize, soon, voice, and so, soon machines will be truly anthropomorphic. They will be able to, you know, to communicate through sensory modalities that in the past were not even conceived possible.

RW: Maybe real people will be able to program their VCRs?

FF: Absolutely, in fact, I kid you not, one of the applications that National is going after is remote television where you basically hold something like that and you move your finger and you basically, with a graphic user interface you do whatever you need to do, you just do that... this kind of movement.

RW: Well I have to get out my... I don't record that much on my VCR. I have to get out my manual...

FF: Yeah.

RW: ...and it takes me about ten minutes.

FF: Anything that has more than fifteen buttons, you know, needs a graphic user interface. [Laughs.]

RW: All right, well thanks, Federico.

FF: Thanks.

[End.]

[Length of Interview: 1:36:33]

[Word Count: 13 201].

Last Modified: June 09, 1998
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