Author Topic: First IC you came in contact with?  (Read 29342 times)

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Offline daneck

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #50 on: May 15, 2015, 10:05:25 am »
If they qualify as "ICs", then the Raytheon CK722 and the GE 2N107 transistors, used to build various radio receiver circuits.

Then much later, got back into electronics and built a microcomputer using the MOS Technology 6502 and associated 6551 ACIA (serial) chip along with a blazing 1K bytes of static memory, all wire-wrapped. It had a real front panel with LEDs so you could see the machine language input bytes and the resulting output when running.

« Last Edit: May 15, 2015, 10:41:34 am by daneck »
 

Offline ciccio

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #51 on: May 15, 2015, 10:43:53 am »
It was in 1967 or 1968. A metal can op-amp (I believe it was a uA709, but I'm not sure, the UA741 came later), in the school lab.

Was this any sort of engineering school or a "normal" school? They never let us play with electronics in school. I have dim memories of handling an oscilloscope in class once. But I think we were just looking at the output of a signal generator, no memories of building any circuits there, I did all this at home. The school had, however, several Apple II, and we could not only use them in class but pretty much everytime in the afternoon as long as a teacher was in the building.
This was an ITI (Istituto Tecnico Industriale): a technical high school that has the first two years common to all students and the next three years with a very strict specialization. My school had: Mechanical Engineering, Thermotechnical Engineering, Radio Communications and (mine) Nuclear Energy.  There was another school in the same city that had Industrial Chemistry and Industrial Electronics.
They were good school, very formative and very selective (my class had 31 students at 3rd year and only 18 arrived at the diploma).
People with ITI degree are the basis of all the industry of my province (Modena) which is  the center of Italy's Motor Valley (Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, Zonda Pagani, De Tomaso, Moto Morini, Ducati) and of the Sassuolo's ceramic tile district.
The ITI diploma was equivalent to a lyceum diploma, giving access to the University.

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Offline BlofeldTopic starter

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #52 on: May 15, 2015, 01:57:41 pm »
I remember as a very young lad playing with the very first widely-available transistor, the Raytheon CK-722 in a lurid blue plastic case



Quote from: daneck
If they qualify as "ICs", then the Raytheon CK722 and the GE 2N107 transistors

I really wouldn't call them IC's, but doesn't matter, the CK722 is so far the component that has surprised me most in this thread. I'm (very roughly) aware of the history of the early (monolithic) Op Amps. But I had no clue that years earlier one humble transistor had whole books devoted to him like "Transistor Applications" from Raytheon - "More than 50 practical circuits using Raytheon CK722 transistors". That's quite amazing.

So it was pure ignorance from my side, if I had known that people would remember their first transistor I would have called the thread "Your first semiconductor" or something. Or, even better, should have included tubes too.
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Offline deephaven

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #53 on: May 15, 2015, 03:52:32 pm »
In that case:

First transistor - Red Spot
First valve (tube) EF91
 

Offline PE1RKI

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #54 on: May 15, 2015, 08:46:41 pm »
my first was the zn415 which i blew up immediately.  :palm:
 

Offline zapta

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #55 on: May 15, 2015, 11:46:24 pm »
First semiconductor: 1n34 diode (crystal radio)
First transistor: oc71 (scratch the black paint and you have a light detector)
 

Offline Dave Turner

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #56 on: May 16, 2015, 03:54:50 pm »
Atferrari - As far as I recall the RTL logic ran at about 3.6v and varied from 6 to 40mA per chip but as they weren't as sophisticated as the 7400 series you tended to need more chips.

Have a look at http://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/rtlcb.pdf

As for first transistor that would be an OC71 - and valve EC91.

Dave
 

Offline gibbled

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #57 on: May 16, 2015, 04:09:00 pm »
Lm3909 from radio shack in 76 or 77.  Soldered up on a fragment of veroboard, it blinked an led for what seemed like years on a aa cell.  I was not even a teenager at the time,  lol.
 

Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #58 on: May 16, 2015, 05:11:00 pm »
So now that the definitions are being tugged around.

First "integrated circuit" would have to be something like the 6M11 tube.  Two triodes and a pentode in the same vacuum envelope.

First transistors would be the Raytheon fellow used in a Philco  two transistor radio kit.  The start of the transistor wars. (My radio has more transistors than yours.  The tube war was basically over, with the bulk of common receivers using the same family of five tubes.)

First silicon ICs were a Fairchild 709 and some forgettable RTL logic that came in a exploration kit - had quartz crystals (both packaged and raw quartz), a thermistor, some ICs and power transistors, a couple of microswitches and some other stuff I have forgotten now.   It was sold at the university book store, and from todays perspective I can say that the logic was very similar to Apple selling in campus bookstores today.  The vendors of the various products in the kit wanted to hook young engineers on their brands early.
 

Offline N2IXK

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #59 on: May 17, 2015, 01:57:09 am »
First "integrated circuit" would have to be something like the 6M11 tube.  Two triodes and a pentode in the same vacuum envelope.

The 6M11 and the other Compactrons were just multi-section tubes. Completely independent sections, with no connections between them. The 12 pin base just allowed more sections within one envelope than were possible in 8 or 9 pin tubes. 

The first real "integrated circuit" probably was one of the Loewe series of "multi-valves", which incorporated resistors and capacitors inside the vacuum envelope along with 3 active triodes to form a "radio in a bottle":

http://www.electricstuff.co.uk/loewe.html
http://www.radiomuseum.org/tubes/tube_3nf.html


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Offline zapta

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #60 on: May 17, 2015, 02:35:55 am »
The 6M11 and the other Compactrons were just multi-section tubes. Completely independent sections, with no connections between them. The 12 pin base just allowed more sections within one envelope than were possible in 8 or 9 pin tubes. 

Tube array?

:)
 

Offline ivaylo

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #61 on: May 17, 2015, 06:35:41 am »
K140UD1A (hmm ok, can't type cyrilic here), must have been like 1982, built this radio with it http://radiostorage.net/?area=news/1729

« Last Edit: May 17, 2015, 03:52:47 pm by ivaylo »
 

Offline G7PSK

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #62 on: May 17, 2015, 08:57:19 am »
Sinclair IC 10 amplifier, The IC was made by Plessey but badged Sinclair. The thing never worked properly if at all, was supposedly rated at ten watts but more like 1 watt in reality. I lost count of the number of times I took it back to the Sinclair office on Newmarket Road Cambridge where they would just chuck it in a bin in front of me and hand me another one. This was around 1969 or 1970.
 

Offline smjcuk

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #63 on: May 17, 2015, 10:20:31 am »
Thats every Sinclair product - they beat the Chinese to low quality by about 20 years :)
 

Offline BlofeldTopic starter

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #64 on: May 17, 2015, 11:24:42 am »
Thats every Sinclair product - they beat the Chinese to low quality by about 20 years :)

The same guy who built the ZX81? That thing was awesome. Only reason I didn't buy it was the membrane keyboard. I had just learned how to type (more or less correctly) on my mothers electrical typewriter and it was great fun. So I didn't want to use this mini-keyboard, and got the C64 some time later.
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Offline SeanB

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #65 on: May 17, 2015, 11:41:25 am »
I have a NOS Sinclair amplifier, I am scared to actually power it up, it might actually work, though there is more probability it will just catch fire. Newmarket transistors third grade QC rejects were the device of choice. They were scooped from the dumpster and checked again, if they were not too leaky ( ie they weren't a dead short with 12V applied) and had a large signal gain of more than 2 they were used.
 

Offline Dave Turner

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #66 on: May 17, 2015, 11:33:19 pm »
I wax philosophical!

When you think about it doesn't really matter what the 'first' of anything one used was, other than to fix a point in time which really only shows your age. Although I like to think that I grew up with the true start of the microelectronic revolution; arguably the space race in the 60's.

What's more to the point is where do we, and later generations, go from here? It's way past the point where one could 'know' everything relevant about a subject (in electronics or anything else). 90's script kiddies, current hackers. are generally exploitations of weaknesses not true innovations.

Most of what is seen in electronics today by the majority are 'advances?' in social media, not necessarily bad as evinced by this forum; or, more importantly, more efficient ways to do things. But it's not fundamentally new science. We can enjoy electronics as our hobby, work etc.devise new products and will never come to fully understand all aspects of the subject.

I'm more interested in what our great grandchildren may have to say looking back at our time.
 

Offline Richard Crowley

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #67 on: May 18, 2015, 12:24:43 am »
... I had no clue that years earlier one humble transistor had whole books devoted to him like "Transistor Applications" from Raytheon - "More than 50 practical circuits using Raytheon CK722 transistors". That's quite amazing.
But remember that it was the VERY FIRST transistor available to the general public. So using a solid-state transistor was a completely new area of circuit design, and we had to start from somewhere.  And some (many?) of use learn best by studying practical examples to see HOW it was done, and then it is easier to go back and look at the theory to see how it was utilized in a practical circuit, etc.

There almost certainly isn't anyone in these forums old enough to remember the similar point in history when the very first valve/vacuum tube became available to experiment with.  There were almost certainly similar books/information available on valve circuits
 

Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #68 on: May 18, 2015, 03:22:49 am »
Just happened to be reading a history of those first valves.  There were books on how to use them, but the theory on how they worked as well as the theory of what you could do with them was much more poorly understood.  By todays standards the folks who invented them, those building them, those using them and those writing the books had no real clue what was going on.  One of the principal inventors thought that the actions was due to gases in the tubes.  For the first several years they simply used trial and error to build functioning tubes/valves.  Yields were in the percentage points.  Good tubes were passed from hand to hand by experimentors.  The books were more of - If you hook this up this way and fiddle a while interesting things will happen. 

Transistors were a new way of doing something that was very well understood.  An emitter follower and a cascode follower are the same thing.  The guys in the early tube era were real explorers of unknown territory.
 

Offline Tandy

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #69 on: May 18, 2015, 02:29:46 pm »
For more info on Tandy try these links Tandy History EEVBlog Thread & Official Tandy Website
 

Offline icon

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #70 on: May 18, 2015, 03:43:54 pm »
Just happened to be reading a history of those first valves. 

A book? You couldn't provide a name, could you?

Thanks
John
 

Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #71 on: May 18, 2015, 05:24:52 pm »
"Empire of the Air/The Men Who Made Radio"  by Tom Lewis. ISBN 0-06-098119-9

The writing style isn't great, and he clearly favors one individual (happens to be my choice also).  Perhaps the most interesting thing in the book is the poor light it shines on the US legal system.
 

Offline Tandy

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #72 on: May 18, 2015, 08:02:49 pm »
For a history of a true genius do some reading on Nikola Tesla, he deserves a lot more recognition for original ideas.
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Offline smjcuk

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #73 on: May 18, 2015, 08:45:09 pm »
For a history of a true genius do some reading on Nikola Tesla, he deserves a lot more recognition for original ideas.

Yes and no. He was completely batshit by the time it came to wireless power tranmission.
 

Offline slurry

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Re: First IC you came in contact with?
« Reply #74 on: May 18, 2015, 08:49:22 pm »
I guess it was the venerable 555  :D
 


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