What does cooping at AMD mean, does it mean a contract job? What is a 80186 clone group (a division at AMD designing 80186 clone CPUs, or a hobby group of 80186 PC enthusiasts?)
But these machines are from 1988, wouldn't one be designing 386 or even 486 clones at that time?
Co-op is a term used by some universities for alternating a work semester at a company with school semester in class in the USA for 2nd/3rd/4th year students. We were paid something like 10-15 an hour which was much better than most non professional work jobs. The group I was in was making money off of refinements and continual production of AMD 80186 chips for drop in replacements for Intel 80186 at a lower cost. The group adjacent to mine was working on reverse engineering 386 clone design from a black box approach (using only public info like the Intel handbook on 386 which I remember they were all reading like it was the bible) and was at a pretty early stage, every one on that team was very senior and IIRC most had PhDs in Electrical Engineering so I was of course very underqualified for that.
Off the top of my head without looking at reference materials - there were a lot of legal issues going on at the time involving AMD/Intel disputes and AMD was on the ropes back then. The 386 project was highly contentious with Intel, I think they started the project as a worse case scenario in the licensing deal - if Intel forbade 386 from the initial contract, AMD could show proof of work on an entirely ground up project to replicate the 386 - the guys on the team were up against a rock and a hard place and were determined but not always optimistic. Also, there was some grumbling when I started because shortly before I started they had some layoffs. AMD was on the brink. This is off of my memory from 25 years ago and I was a pretty lowly coop and only heard this from meals and shared open workspace with the other project.
edit: I looked it up and there was a dispute if the license applied until 1991 for the 386.
But these machines are from 1988, wouldn't one be designing 386 or even 486 clones at that time?