13 Mar
2014
13 Mar
'14
4:35 p.m.
On 03/13/2014 06:25 AM, dwight wrote:
What is that controller chip on the early Winchester
controller boards. That was a 64 pin part.
G??X300 or something.
That was the infamous bipolar 8x300 by SMS, later Signetics. I suppose
that the best term would be "microcontroller". Very small instruction
set, weird architecture but not limited to hard disk use. There were a
number of add-on chips, including a floppy controller.
I know about the Rockwell stagger-row packages, but they also came up
with some big DIPs. It took a bit of looking, but here you go:
http://www.cpushack.com/2013/05/06/cpu-of-the-day-rockwell-pps-41-the-other…
I don't know when Rockwell introduced the big DIPs for development, but
I do remember them.
I mention the TMS1000 because it was the first single-chip MCU as far as
I can tell, long before anyone was thinking about MCUs. While the 4004
may have been the first MPU, it required a load of specialized external
support chips to do anything. The National IMP-16 was probably similar
in chip count for a given word width.
--Chuck