13 Oct
2007
13 Oct
'07
4:07 p.m.
On Saturday 13 October 2007 16:01, jim s wrote:
Roy J. Tellason wrote:
I may have even heard of them somewhere along the line, though I'm not
certain.
I've often wondered why it is that 14-pin
packages seemed to dominate the
early parts so much.
There was a company started up in the 1971 or 1972 time frame in
Columbia, Missouri that made a splash in the IC market by offering "cheap"
parts. It was Solid State Industries, or SSI and sold a pretty good mix of
7400 IC's. They bought the die and packaged them in Columbia. The big cost
was the packaging machine at the time. That is to some degree what dictated their choices of
what to package,
since they eliminated the actual silicon fab from their business model.
Interesting bit of history there.
They kept up for a while but eventually were wiped out
the eventual drop
of prices to a few cents.
I remember that drop, I used to look at the ads in the back of magazines like
Popular Electronics and such, where something like a 7400 went from a couple
of dollars down and down and down, eventually getting to the point of around
10 cents or so for one. And then LSTTL came into the picture and complicated
the heck out of things, and they've been getting more so ever since then.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
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Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin