Exceeding Vgs rating

Back in the day you could often do that. Consolidation has mostly blown that up in the semiconductor world--TI used to second-source National parts, AD used to second-source PMI, et cetera, et cetera.

But even then the differences were very real. For instance, the jellybean TLV431 from different vendors have completely different stability properties vs. capacitive load.

Nowadays there are so many single-sourced parts that virtually no design can be protected from this problem.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

isions, no-one noticing there was any kind of problem. And anyone that noti ced and said anything got the blame for anything they can think up. No surp rise that the mortality rate of big successful businesses is so high.

FWIW my experience has been that the accumulation of stupid decisions is of ten what kills the thing. And if it doesn't, time usually does. Products mo ve on, what was great years ago isn't any more.

Success breeds cruft, inefficiency & complacency. And that breeds successfu l competitors.

I suppose there are many ways for profitable companies to fail.

Having said that I've been out of bigcorp territory for years. I learnt it wasn't what I was looking for.

NT

I rode IBM down for 30+ years. They actively tried to kill microprocessors, to the (silly) point of just speaking the word a career limiting move. And Intel came along and killed their cow. They didn't _allow_ themselves to kill it.

Certainly true/ Major corporations have the right of first refusal on new ideas. They have the cash to develop them or buy the startup that is. Of course, if they choose the latter option, they tend to try to bury the evidence. Never works.

Lots of minor causes and hard to isolate it down to one, usually - all directly on senior management's shoulders.

I've worked for &BigCorp. almost my entire career. It has its advantages.

That's a common pattern. A company won't kill their own cash cow, so they let someone else do it.

That's exactly my point. IBM could have bought (almost did) Intel but they would have just buried it in the back yard of Armonk.

I once accidentally ran a 5V quartz-windowed MC68HC11 on 9V, and it worked... except for the ADC that was damaged. Back on 5V, the current consumption was slightly raised, but everything else still worked ok. The ADC was still dead.

Heh, surprised it didn't glow yellow-green. Or maybe it did, but it was too dim to see.

Tim

That was a nice processor - along with the Hitachi clones like the 63701.

John

Which unfortunately were killed because of the dispute between Hitachi and Motorola. I had the whole 63701 family in use.

Ah happy days, the purple flash from a windowed 8749 when you blew it up...

Indeed. If it had flash and hardware breakpoint support I could have been much more ambitious with it. As it was, being mainly a software guy, I'd get the hardware working, make a start on the software, and get bored with the erase-program-test cycle before finishing projects.

I built a remote debugger that fit in 256 bytes, and a user in France debugged his RTOS that controlled a hobby rocket to 25,000 feet. He now works with ESA, last I heard.

On Monday, 16 April 2018 11:48:10 UTC+1, Clifford Heath wrote: ...

I had an eprom emulator that plugged into the "piggy back" eprom socket of a 63P01 which greatly speeded up that process.

As the one-time-programmable devices were much cheaper than the windowed ones I tried X-ray erasure (at 30keV). Unfortunately, although this worked, the storage cells became permanently leaky.

John

up...

Heart-warming, to be sure. Of course anyone nostalgic for the days of burn-and-crash development(*) can always use Arduino. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(*) for any youngsters lurking, the pun refers to burning (programming) an EPROM and then watching your program crash, fixing the bug, and iterating till it stopped crashing.

Who would need a debugger with assembler, those days programs worked at the first time