Cpushack

Back in the late 1970's and early 1980's Sandia National Laboratory (in Albuquerque NM USA) began building the capacity to design, fab, and test IC's at scale (packaging was handled by Fairchild and Allied Signal). Why would a National Laboratory need the

AM1608 Chipset - 1979 - Synertek Back in 1974 the US Air Force saw the beginnings of a problem as the switch to digital microprocessor controls took over. "Fearful of being stuck with many unique systems requiring extensive software and hardware support,

General Automation GA-16 - 266A01 RALU and 267A02 CROM General Automation was founded in 1968, just prior to the beginning of the microprocessor boom of the 1970's. They were founded by Burt Yale, a former aerospace engineer from the Gemini space program,

Intel 60077 Unknown There are always interesting surprises when collecting CPUs, and anything really. There are those chips that are unicorns, or white whales, spoke of, maybe even documented but never (or almost never) seen. For example Hitachi made a co

"Copy It" "Around the same time that Nikita Khrushchev declared his support for building Zelenograd. A Soviet student named Boris Malin returned from a year studying in Pennsylvania with a small device in his luggage - a Texas Instruments SN-51, one first

It's been a long while since I have been able to post/write, having a new baby apparently does that (I missed that in the datasheet). Since I have neglected posting, or forgotten, lets continues with 'The Forgotten Ones" This brings us to 1971, Fairchild,

In 1974 National Semiconductor introduced what is arguably the first 16-bit microprocessor (it had a 8-bit mode as well which was more efficient but could run 16-bits as well). This chip was made on a PMOS process and ran at 1.3MHz. In some ways it was ah

About a year ago Mats Danielson from Stockholm Sweden contacted the CPU Shack about an interesting project, documenting the history of Philips Data Systems, a former powerhouse of European computing. Previously we wrote about the SPC16 micro used in some