Patrick was never an employee, he preferred to work on a contract basis - and the hardware design was definitely a joint effort (he did schematic capture, pcbs, etc, but I did a lot of the design - the digital audio interface, the VFD, IDE, PICs, etc). I suspect he'll be rather busy with his other projects :)

Why do you think your mk1 is consigned to anything? It's still a supported product. We have plenty of spares and have no problems with servicing them either.

Hugo