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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: combjelly who wrote (870657)7/6/2015 10:21:00 PM
From: J_F_Shepard   of 1577594
 
How long did IBM stick with transistors? Until 1965 or so? Commercially, it was about 1970 before ICs started to show up.

IBM had single transistor's in manufacturing before 65 and used them to build the System 360 computer systems, ......360 was a huge success. Apollo 11's (July 69) LEM had an on board computer built by IBM using single transistors mounted on small ceramic circuit boards....that computer had been designed about 10 years earlier and NASA stuck with it even though better ones were then available..... The chips were bipolar transistors known as SLT (silicon logic transistor, I think). They had 3 solder bumps on one side and were soldered upside down on a small ceramic circuit board. I joined IBM Research in 65 when they began a silicon program to develop MOS devices......our objective was to develop a 512 bit memory chip using MOS processing.....the densest bipolar memory chip only had 16 bits....we had a 512 chip ready and decided to go right to 1024 bits in manufacturing. Meantime, Intel was formed and came out with a 256 bit chip which quickly dominated the market.....that was about 1970-71. Bipolar memory chips kinda faded away after that.
We were projecting the cost of a transistor on a memory chip to get below 0.1 cents ......it actually got much lower than that and continues to drop with increasing chip density....

With regard to govmint help, IBM had a huge proposal ready to got out for fed funds when I got there to build a "computer on a chip"......at the last minute they withdrew it to protect proprietary information that would have gone public.... But DARPA was a huge player in the business....
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