The funny pattern behind the machine is a dump of the scan of good/bad die on a four inch silicon wafer.  This was generated by an early vision system and was necessary to prevent picking and placing bad dice.

In 1980 the Jade Corporation was under contract to Fairchild Semiconductor to provide a 10,000 parts per hour machine for attaching small semiconductor dice to leadframes. They had no concept of how to do this since the absolute fastest machine in existence could only manage 2,500. They brought John into the company and prayed. Well so did he, since he hadn't heard of such a machine before. With a lot of fundamental schooling by some people at Jade including his boss/later dear friend Bert Weiss, he managed a concept in three months, and a working machine in something like a year. Kulicke & Soffa, a local competitor, had tried to make such a machine and failed. And indeed, after seeing the machine run at a robotic show, they tried again and failed. They reportedly spent something over 4-6 million in the attempt. John got rats from the Jade president, for exceeding a budget he was unaware of, and costing the company $750,000.