There was once a genius engineer who was employed by Zilog, but moonlighted at LSI Logic.
While moonlighting, he became aware of one of the major problems ASIC companies faced - they didn't really know whether their ICs worked or not until they were put into silicon.
And putting designs into silicon cost a lot of money. Even then.
So he set to thinking how to get round that problem, and designed a sort of silicon breadboard on which a design, or part of a design, could be programmed and tried out in silicon without incurring the cost of fabricating a chip.
He was so pleased with what he had invented that he showed it to his boss at Zilog. His boss thought it was a good enough idea to build a new company on.
So they both left Zilog and set up a new company which became No.1 in the programmable logic industry.
MORAL: Some Of The Best Ideas Come While Moonlighting
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