I see two, for $50 and $60, the $50 unit being clearly bowed outward along the bottom rail, and the $60 unit for parts only.
I imagine that Los Alamos had many of these TDC (Time Digital Converters), and they were Expensive. Time for some competition.
When was this?
How did he know to ask?
For rape and pillage.
I have similar stories regarding computer platform and operating system and compiler vendors who were slow to take the term "open source" on board. But I've forgotten their names.
IIRC, they first belonged to Schlumberger, therefore "Schlumchild".
I recently got some Fairchild LM350 via Digikey. LM350 is intended to be a stronger LM317, but the metal tab was more like a metal foil, and on one, it fell off completely, and I was gentle. I decided not to use them.
It goes back a lot further than that, and is a whole lot more complicated
formatting link
started up in 1957.
"In 1963, Fairchild hired Robert Widlar to design analog operational amplifiers using Fairchild's process. Since Fairchild's processes were optimized for digital circuits, Widlar collaborated with process engineer Dave Talbert. The collaboration resulted in two revolutionary products – µA702 and µA709."
The first integrated circuit I ever bought was a uA709..
"In March 1967, Sporck was hired away by Peter J. Sprague to National Semiconductor. Sporck brought with him four other Fairchild personnel. Actually, Lamond had previously assembled a team of Fairchild managers in preparation to defect to Plessey, a British company. Lamond had recruited Sporck to be his own boss. When negotiations with Plessey broke down over stock options, Lamond and Sporck succumbed to Widlar's and Talbert's (who were already employed at National Semiconductor) suggestion that they look to National Semiconductor. Widlar and Talbert had earlier left Fairchild to join Molectro, which was later acquired by National Semiconductor."
I worked for Plessey Pacific in Australia in 1970 and 1971, who were a subsidiary of the British parents, and did some local semiconductor design (which got turned into silicon in the UK). We were extremely fond of Bob Widlar's parts.
Many years later , when I was working for Cambridge Instruments in the UK, we sold an an electron beam microfabricator to Fairchild (who had been taken over by Schlumberger at that point) which they used to make the masks for their 100k ECL which we used in some of the faster stuff we sold.
Another Cambridge company - Lintech - had sold an electron beam tester to Fairchild a few years earlier. The guy who had done most ot the electronic design at Lintech - one Neil Richardson (who I'd met once or twice in Cambridge) - had installed the machine and trained the guys that used it, and impressed them enough that they ended up hiring him too. A few years later Schlumberger used him to lead a team that developed a better electron beam tester, which drove Lintech out of business. Mike Engelhardt - of LT Spice fame - was part of that team.
From what I gather about the places that supply the military with obsolete junk from filing cabinets full of old die is they use the same stuff as when the products were made, so somewhere there's a clean room with 1980s machinery in it and the same test equipment still making old/simple parts. No idea how they maintain that stuff, even the best of machines eventually fall apart. Even if you have the museum quality automated tester, how do you feed it data? tapes? floppies? reference parts?
So does TI have some fab line that's stuck in 1987 still working as it did in the past? Not sure, but I assume so. I really do wonder what's in the analog only places, like Polar etc. Same thing with that- eventually the people running that stuff retire.
I do some work maintaining machines that have had no support for decades. Most are simple enough to hack back into operation, but you still run into some really weird stuff like computers that backup to audio tape etc.
Not sure. It does seem the original suppliers of parts will dump the last run of inventory, even unpackaged wafers and masks to third parties. As to whether or not I could get some old buggy USB 1.0 controller chips made for me, for any price with certification that they meet original production specs in questionable though.
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