13 Oct
2007
13 Oct
'07
12:56 p.m.
"Roy J. Tellason" wrote:
On Saturday 13 October 2007 10:46, dwight elvey wrote:
There was a brief period (early-mid 60s) were packaging was as you suggest,
early RTL ICs were in 8 or 10 pin cans and flat-paks with typically two gates
per package. As densities increased there was little point though, when
building systems with hundreds or thousands of gates, 2-gates per package just
increased the package count and the potential wastage of 2 unused gates in a
quad pack just wasn't a concern.
Package size was always a dominating cost and
defined many projects.
I've often wondered why it is that 14-pin packages seemed to dominate the
early parts so much. Why they never offered, for example, a dual 2-input
gate package instead of the more common quad, or other combinations like
that. It seemed sometimes that things were altered a bit to fit into those
14-pin packages that they wanted to use... And I don't lay any claim to having any kind of a
clue about what factors
dominated the economics of things back then. :-)