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Swords Into Plowshares
On Jun 5, 5:58�am, Misters Davis, McKenzie, and Crowley all wrote
about integrated circuits. "K6LHA" Len Anderson wrote... Almost ALL developments in electronics began as industry projects, eve n the IC. There is some controversy in the industry whether Intel or TI made the "first IC." Intel's first IC was for an Asian customer to use in a four-function calculator. Ahem...the original subject was started in regards to WWII-era "surplus" electronic hardware. Semiconductors - as we know them today - don't quite qualify since Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley did their transistor thing in 1947 at Bell Labs. :-) As to the very first of the "scientific handheld calculators," a good part of that story is written up in "Bill and Dave: How Hewlett and Packard created the world's greatest company" by Michael Malone. In itself, that book is representative of the entire electronics industry from 1939 onwards (HP was formed in 1939) and the (usually) monthly magazine put out free by HP, "Hewlett Packard Journal" shows that in detail. ALL the issues of the HP Journal are on-line and are free downloads. As one of the early owners of an HP-35, I can add that there was no ONE IC that was critical in it. Each one had a set of ICs that did everything, contracted for from two vendors. A fault of HP somewhere down the design line was not specifying things correctly and chips from one IC vendor would not work with those from another vendor. One of mine failed and I found out that story the hard way. HP just did not expect nearly the onslaught of orders for the '35 (described in Malone's book) and they had to set up for multiple shifts to handle them and to revise their marketing practices. Eventually HP would establish a division in Corvallis, OR, just for calculators and special ICs for those and other HP divisions. The first desktop calculator was the HP 9100 introduced in 1968. It had NO ICs in it, not even RAM or ROM. Details of its design are in the HP Journal of September 1968. It was also the first time HP employed a "full-time" consultant named Tom Osborne who demonstrated a working model he had built in his apartment. He used CORDIC algorithms which HP long-timer David Cochrane crammed into the 9100's ROM-equivalent. Both were involved in the later "box of numbers" called the HP-35. My HP-35 still works but the NiCad pack always gave trouble in recharging (three of them did) and I got a programmable HP-25, gave that to my Tech at Teledyne so that I could get an HP-67 which had program storage via magnetic card. Long time after the little card reader jammed and I got the CMOS HP-32S II which lasted ten years on one battery set, now on its 2nd set. I bought an anniversary model, the HP-35S as a memento and am waiting for the '32 to fail before using that. :-) However... With today's VLSI circuits... You do need an "Infrastructure" to "Tinker" and short of folks like Mr. Gates and partners... Not many people have that kind of resource on their own. Slight correction. I'm playing with Microchip's PIC one-package micros right now, using their free program editor-compiler. Got the development hardware package because IC lead length spacings got too small with modst SMDs. For many years AADE and Neil Heckt have been making and selling their one-chip frequency counters up in the Puget Sound area and many hams have installed those in older receivers and transceivers. Neil has a great little workshop instrument in his L/C meter also using a PIC chip. As to "surplus," I can say I've operated a lot of that while in the US Army 1952-1960 since so much was manufactured before or during WWII...some of it by Lewyt Vacuum Cleaner Co. for big hulking 1 KW HF transmitters (BC-339, BC-340). In another area, some of the contracted-for communuications electronics designed after WWII showed a different design scheme of systems, circuitry, even physical mounting than the pre-WWII thinking. There has been a constant evoltion of design, use, application of 'radio' for the last seven decades. 73, Len K6LHA |