Brent asks:
Are there any known examples of real-world products or
equipment that
used the 14500 ?
(Leaving aside evaluation boards & such.)
I've seen it used in railway interlocking control panels and HVAC
applications from the early 80's... places where PDP-14's had previously
been used and it's pretty obvious the design was done from ladder logic
principles.
Interestingly, a certain generation of GRS interlocking control panels
used PC boards and backplanes exactly matching the format of quad-height DEC modules.
I never traced out the backplane wiring but at first glance it was nothing
like Q-bus or Omnibus.
I had the impression of it as a bit of a stillborn
product, like the
Fairchild CMOS Macrologic series (34700/4700 ICs), of limited
cost-effectiveness or benefit by the time it was introduced.
There were many bitslice families out there that never saw wide use
or maybe only existed in databooks. After the 2901 everyone tried
to jump in. The MC14500B at least was obviously not a 2901 clone :-)
Tim.