J
John Larkin
- Jan 1, 1970
- 0
Might have been just before your time, when the 64 kbit chips made
semi memory really take off. IBM made an announcment that they
were the first with a 64k chip, but the silicon valley outfits'
chips were smaller/cheaper, faster, and only needed one power supply.
It looked (from outside) that that was the point where IBM realized
that they couldn't do it all by themselves, so they bought into Intel.
(I worked for a semi equipment manufacturer and we got a tour of
one of Intel's Oregon fab's back end (testing line) sometime in 1981.
All sort of guys with IBM badges on running around the front end (fab)
part of the plant).
The first ram I used was a TI 64-bit TTL part, used to make a 4-deep
subroutine return stack for the only CPU I ever designed. Then we
moved on the the AMI 1-k dynamic ram, for a color video display. That
was a cool chip: an analog mux tree fed a pair of pins directly to the
drains of a cross-coupled fet pair that was the memory cell. The user
had to provide the sense amps and regererate refresh back into the
cell.
Because the Japanese and Koreans were eating everybodies lunch...
Especially on quality.
John