Will Donzelli wrote: The information contained herein was gathered from interviews with some of the players that were involved during the time, including Don Farina, Richard Craig, and Bob Norman. Some of the information I've gathered over time has some conflict in it, so take this all with a suitably sized grain of salt. Most of the information was gathered by talking to these folks about the development of General Micro-electronics and the Victor 3900 calculator, but sheer inertia led to discovery of some of what happened after GM-e disappeared. The history of Nitron is pretty twisted. It all started as a result of the purchase of General Micro-electronics by Philco-Ford after GM-e ran out of capital after an extremely intense effort to develop the Victor 3900 calculator (out of the first MOS LSI chips ever made for commercial use). Some of the folks that worked for GM-e left and founded a number of different IC companies..some making chips, and some serving as consultancies. GM-e was founded by a number of Fairchild folks who were frustrated with the fact that Fairchild didn't seem interested in pursuing MOS integrated circuits. There were two companies that were spinoffs or derivatives of spinoffs Semiconductor Technology) that ended up making LSI chipsets for calculators among other things. IST did the design work, and Cartesian fabricated the chips. Commodore became a main customer, and used the chips (initially a three-chip set). At one point, the founders of IST and Cartesian got together and decided that the two companies should merge, and a company called Veradyne was born. The timeframe isn't quite clear on this, but it was probably sometime in 1969. Veradyne fell on hard times sometime in mid-1972, and Commodore (Jack Tramiel) ended up purchasing the IST division of Veradyne in order to keep his calculator chips coming, calling the company the IST Division of Commodore Systems, Inc. Later in '72, McDonnell Douglas bought out the rest of Veradyne, and renamed the company Nitron. Frank Wanlass was made President. Nitron went on to be a contract design & manufacturer of LSI chips, including some single-chip calculator ICs that became fairly popular on the "build it yourself" market...bubble-packed chips sold at places like Poly Paks and others. Nitron must have existed sometime into the 1980's, given the dating on the chip you found. I have a Nitron single-chip calculator IC from '73 that is in a ceramic 40-pin dip with gold lid and pins. Hope this helps a little. Rick Bensene The Old Calculator Museum http://oldcalculatormuseum.com