This is the excerpt from "Cycle Sport" Oct 2004 issue where there is an article of an interview with Phil Anderson and this is the part regards to the STI unit he tested.
"Anderson has one more 'first ' against his name,which bookmards one of the most significant developments in recent bike design.Anderson was the first to use Shimano STI levers."That was when I was on TVM,they were using Campagnolo,"he explains."I hadn't used Shimano but I liked it,it seemed to be running well in the peloton and Campag was going through its mid to late-Eighties crisis with equipment.I said that I wanted to bring Shimano on board.
"So Shimano were pretty enthusiastic about having me ride their stuff.I remember in Italy them coming over and asking me to look at this new stuff.This was at the time when they had the indexing on the levers and clipless pedals had been around for a while.They came in with this concept of being able to change gears through the brake lever.They had clay models that were pretty cumbersome,with cables going in every direction.
"I said,'it looks great''They asked if they could keep showing me these things and eventually have me try them in a prototype form.About a year or so later they came back and it was in a rideable form.They just rolled up to the car park somewhere,it was the Tour of Italy or somewhere and we tried them around a parking lot.The first time I raced on them it was at the Tour of Ireland,obviously no one had ever seen them before,every one was laughing and carrying on.
"This one engineer,Jimebo,he came and lived with me in Belgium;he'd come out and follow me on the moped every day.We'd sit round the dinner table chatting and he'd be drawing on the talbecloth - he bloody cut it up and tried to put it through the fax machine!
"A couple of days later another model would turn up,it was great.I remember the sensitivity on it as a big issue.It's a bit like the old non-friction levers where you couldn't feel anything until,clonk.it was in.I remember it was very vague and I wanted to have a bit of a click to it.
"It worked out really great,the relationship with Shimano.I still keep in contact with the engineers,they support out crew with the Croc Torphy............
Shimano recently presented Anderson with Dura-Ace 25th anniversary groupset serial number two.Number one is in a museum in Japan.