LS/HCT/etc. logic familes

This is still overkill because of the need for programming. What does that require and how many of the pins?

I think it was five SSI/MSI devices in very small packages (DFN I believe) was pretty compact and did the job. There was no requirement for programmability as it was just an SPI port controlled by another CPU on another board. I don't recall the reason for not using an SPI port expander, but it may have been that the SSI/MSI parts were already inventoried. Why add a new part to the company stores?

"TTL is very much mainstream and will stay that way for a very long time."

Welllllll I guess "a very long time" is up

Exactly. Some of my consulting assignments started because of that. There was no text document whatsoever, several ICs had become unobtanium, there were always numerous production issues and each unit had to be brought to life via magic incantations and skillful turning of a dozen trimpots, some simultaneously. Of course that alignment process wasn't documented either. So the first hours were spent on "Why was this done that way?", "Where is the firmware for U43?" ... "Oh dang, on an

A large project I was involved in had about 3 feet shelf length of binders just for the hardware module specs, all full. In English we could have probably done it in 2-1/2 feet because the language is more efficient for tech stuff.

A mantra of the VP of R&D at my first employer, a former longtime army sergeant: "If you didn't document it, it didn't happen". That guy was a great manager.

Sometimes documenters can be _great_ jerks. Recently had a go-round with such a jerk who insisted on filing an "architecture" document before I'd even had time to contemplate the specifications.

(I ended up offending his "sensibilities" >:-} ...Jim Thompson

Half a century is a /very/ long time indeed!

Tim

We document designs pretty well, in a design notes doc. Whiteboards are titled and dated and photographed and saved in the project folder.

We even document breadboards. We have a folder on a server, J:\PROTOS, and every breadboard or non-production test board gets its own Zxxx part number and folder. That has schematic, whiteboard pics, proto pix, PCB layout if there is one, test results, general notes. If we learn anything about a part, that gets copied into the PDATA folder for that part in our inventory database.

That stuff is great to keep.

It all gets backed up offsite, and if the media somehow goes obsolete, we'll be doing backups for a lot of cycles on new media. Currently, we use terabyte USB hard drives in write-once mode for offsite backups.

We have one customer with a massively complex paperwork system. They write a formal EPS (element performance specification) *before* they talk to us about what's possible or best. Then when we see it and make suggestions, there is a complex set of steps required to alter the EPS, which requires filling out more forms. The forms are full of buggy Word macros.

What's an 8-inch floppy?

That doesn't sound right at all.

Sounds all too familiar... the paperwork takes 3-4X as much time as the actual design :-(

My particular 'jerk' had a team of about 20 people to do a chip design in 4 months... a chip design I would typically do, all by myself, in the same 4 months (and FULLY worst-cased ;-) ...Jim Thompson

The coolest gadget I've ever seen was a whiteboard with a built-in copier... when you were done scribbling, you pressed a button, and a scanner bar passed over the whiteboard making a hard-copy file (PNG).

I have, many times, simply photographed a whiteboard, and inserted that into the documentation.

...Jim Thompson

A few years back, noting that new versions of Wimpows weren't supporting my legacy drives, I spent nearly a week copying from such 'legacy' media onto CD's and DVD's.

I have a stack of CD's and DVD's probably 18" high ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Ooooh, antiques! I've never seen the black one in real life. The red looks like what I used to play Oregon Trail on the Apple II in 2nd grade. The blue one is what I used to save assignments on in high school. I hung on to a few of those but they were all dead and bit-rotted last I tried to load anything off them, maybe around 2007

Good news is that I discovered my Nintendo Entertainment System "Dragon Warrior" game cartridge, which I last played around 1989 and had a CMOS memory with battery back-up for save states, still worked fine and had all my saved games from when I was about 12 years old available to play circa 2010

I've seen several like that, all broken.

We do that a lot. I photographed two whiteboards today. I sometimes put a wb photo into a formal proposal; nobody seems to mind.

In my new office, I want really good whiteboard lighting and a permanent-mounted webcam to snap the doodles.

(The office is going to be 24x24, 576 square feet. There are condos in this town half that size.)

Dec sold a rackmount dual 8" floppy, a couple of hundred kilobytes per drive, for the PDP-11. It cost over $3K.

What's a CD?

:)

Den torsdag den 13. juli 2017 kl. 02.43.06 UTC+2 skrev Jim Thompson:

make sure to keep the old drives, I have a lot of CDs that are basically unreadable with anything but an old 4x drive

Woah it's 1975. Ok, let's go all in and rent a System 370 for $42,000/month!