There is an amusing sequel to this story actually, and no harm in telling the story after all these years. The 68K product was a proprietary networking card for a private telephone exchange type product made by Philips. After developing the product in NZ a hardware guy and I were sent to the Netherlands for final testing and further integration prior to manufacture. The Dutch engineers were very well trained and competent, but used to hugely elaborate heavy process and the more free-wheeling type of development we were used to was definitely foreign territory. Rumours that the crazy guy from New Zealand had developed the telephone switch software in his chess computer (i.e. now that I've explained the story, false rumours) preceded our arrival.

Now I was young and dumb at the time, and I had decided for some reason to jokingly call the simple bit bashing communication protocol I'd invented to talk to my chess computer "V.69" (The V series protocols - eg V.24 = RS-232 in the USA were big at the time). A V.69 port had actually made it into the final schematics for our board. It was just 5 logic level pins (two inputs two outputs plus ground) - and in production it would not have any impact - but it was possible to solder a 5 pin header onto the pins, and hook it up to a PC running the same terminal software previously discussed - If such a PC was connected my embedded code would emit diagnostic information.

We had many meetings during our visit, with the typically gruff non-nonsense Dutch engineers and their huge vats of extraordinarily strong coffee. One of them was with "the Standards guy" who wanted to audit compliance to all possible standards - I was able to spectate mainly as it was hardware stuff. But suddenly he was pointing at the V.69 connector, clearly labelled as such. We'd forgotten all about it. Us> "Oh well, arrrgh, yes. It's a diagnostic port - for the lab only - no impact on production - the header is just omitted." Him> "But what is this V.69 standard?". Us (hopefully)> "Well, it's just a 5v serial diagnostics standard". Him> "Okay, yes I've heard of it". So as is often the case, the need to save face saved the day.