Where, I hear you ask, did the name *7 come from? Well... At the Sand Hill Road site our PacBell phone system had a useful feature: If any phone rang, you could answer it from any other phone by picking up the handset and punching the "*" and "7" keys. So if someone was out of their office (usually hunched over a workbench with a soldering iron in hand) and their phone rang, they'd yell out "Star 7!!" to kick someone else into answering for them. When we were picking a name for the gizmo, "Star 7" was getting yelled a lot.
It was a pretty chaotic environment.