Magnolia Workstation

The Magnolia was Roger Bates' dual 6800 workstation built in quantity 60 for the Computer Research Lab.

Roger wrote a C language clone of SIL and used it to design the cpu retrofit that became the 4404 AI Workstation.

I asked if I could hack SIL. Roger said yes, but only if I promised not to criticize how he wrote code. (He wrote it like he designed hardware.)

I lent my Magnolia to Carver Mead so long as he promised to give me a good tour of the VLSI work they were doing in his lab. That was a great deal.

The Magnolia had a sound chip on one of the boards. Chip Schnarel had written basic unix drivers for it. I wrote C code to make a Morse Code Sweep which I recorded and lent to Dave Keith.