| General > General Technical Chat |
| First IC you came in contact with? |
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| VK5RC:
I vaguely recall it was either a LM3900 quad op amp or a LM386, the National Semiconductor Linear IC book was like a candy store. |
| fable:
TDA1170 |
| tron9000:
it was either the 741 or the 555 - can't remember |
| Terabyte2007:
7400, what else! :) |
| uChip:
In 1972 my dad (a Ham for many years) worked out of an office building in Minneapolis. It happened to be the same building as the local Fairchild sales office. Somehow my dad managed to get the Fairchild sales fellow to clean out his junk drawer. Dad came home with tubes of RTL ICs, flip-flops, multivibrators and nor gates. About the same time dad bought me a "counter kit" at Radio Shack. The kit consisted of two 7474 ICs connected as a four-bit ripple counter, a photo cell connected to the clock line and pea lights on the outputs. I assembled the kit and learned to solder. The counter taught me about flip-flops, counter circuits and the binary number system. I bought another 7474 and a breakout board and increased the counter to six bits. Soon after that I wrote to every semiconductor manufacturer whose address I could find (no Google search in those days) and asked for a databook and any parts they would send me. Fairchild sent me a databook for a calculator chip set that was almost a microprocessor. Signetics and TI both sent me their 7400 series databooks. A kind fellow at Dialight (if I think about it long enough I'm sure I will remember his name) sent me not only a databook, but a selection of LEDs; individual lights in various form factors, but also a 1-character 7-segment and even a 1-character 5x7 matrix display. Later that year I met someone who worked at Memorex computers who gave me a 64-bit Memorex memory chip. So I think the first chip I handled was actually a Fairchild 9602, but the first one that I really made work was the 7474. I eventually did use the 9602 in a circuit as an oscillator, but it wasn't the chips that started me on my way. It was those databooks. I poured over them like they were the Sears & Roebuck wish-book. I read and memorized every datasheet. By the time I got to college I knew just about every 7400 series part by heart. Thanks for the opportunity to wax nostalgic. And thanks again to those generous souls who helped a young kid get started. |
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