74xx orgin

On May 15, 13:45, Hans Franke wrote: According to Webopaedia and at least one history website, Texas released the first SSI TTL chips in 1965 and LSTTL in 1970. It certainly must have been before 1970 becasue DEC were using 7440's, 7481's ($9 each according to the spares list), and 74Hxx in quantity for the PDP-11/20 by 1970. The PDP-8/I used TTL in 1968. And the Smithsonian site quotes "NMAH catalog number 1987.0487.128, 314, 315 1964 - TI-G00206,294, 343 documentation News release: TI Announces new Series Of Semiconductor Integrated Circuits Combining High Speed And Low Power Advantages -- Solid Circuit Series 54" Nat Semi's website history pages quote 1970 as the year they made money But the earliest I can find in my Texas data books for MSI is 1972 for the 72181, same as Philip. The data sheets for the SSI are obviously older than that. Curiously, although there's lots of information on TI's own company information pages in the "Innovations" section, they don't mention TTL. The only relevant items are a press release on June 23, 1964 about granting of patents including "Features of integrated 'AND gates' and related devices" and mentioning that "Current Texas Instruments SOLID CIRCUIT? semiconductor networks contain up to 69 component equivalents formed within a single bar of ultra pure silicon material". That's not 54/74 series TTL, though, it's 51-series. The other is a reference to "1972: first ABACUS-II wire bonder, enabling high-volume IC production." There's some information on that at http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/company/history/abacus.shtml which I found very interesting as I used a manual wire bonder on a visit to Ferranti around 1972. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York