We discovered this slick rendition of a collie dog on a Hewlett-Packard support chip removed from a motherboard containing the PA-7100LC chipset. This is the same motherboard that contains the Crayon on another support chip and the Con Artist and the Hummingbird on the microprocessor. Judging from the fact that the most famous collie is Lassie, star of numerous television and movie episodes, we think that this miniature version of the dog may be a tribute to the star.

Charlie Spillman of Agilent Technologies, who was one of the original Hewlett-Packard chip designers, has provided us with some background information on the Lassie integrated circuit. The codename for the chip during development was LASI, which was derived from the fact that the chip contained a Local Area Network (LAn) interface as well as a Small Computer System Interface (scSI) port. The collie drawing that appears on the chip was done by the brother of another chip designer. Charlie informs us that Hewlett-Packard fabrication plants banned logos on new chips not long after this one appeared.