It's taken me a while to get up to speed on this thread, which is pretty long and pretty repetitive, and the prototype cannondale thread, but it's very interesting.
Bob, have you noticed this quote:
My wife, Harriet Fell is a hard-core roadie; she never rides the mountain bike I gave her. She has:
Harriet Fell track bike
When she was a math professor at Northeastern University in the early '70s, she built this aluminum frame in an M.I.T. I.A.P. project, but never finished building it up. This is one of the first fat-tube aluminum bikes, and, in fact the frame was an important exhibit in the legal proceedings between Cannondale and her classmate Gary Klein.
I assembled it for her in the winter of 2005.
from
Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Page
Thanks, Rudi - yes, I caught that article a while back. I've yet to dig into the earliest days involving the IAP (or the legal proceedings between Klein and Cannondale for that matter), but they're on the short-list for my history lesson. 'The High-Tech Bicycle' also gives a little info and a couple of pictures.
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To tie up a loose end from earlier in the thread, I contacted Jon Rock a while back. Unfortunately this bike pre-dates his era of expertise for Kleins. There are a few die hards out there it seems, so the search will continue.