"800 missiles a "large run"?"
Considering it consumed the entire IC industry for 3 or 4 years, and most of the production for a few more years, I'd say that is a 'yes'. Remember, the industry didn't top $1 billion until well into the 1980s.
knowledgerush.com
One of the first recognizably modern embedded systems was the Apollo Guidance Computer, developed by Charles Stark Draper at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. At the project's inception, the Apollo guidance computer was considered the riskiest item in the Apollo project as it employed the then newly developed monolithic integrated circuits to reduce the size and weight. An early mass-produced embedded system was the Autonetics D-17 guidance computer for the Minuteman missile, released in 1961. It was built from transistor logic and had a hard disk for main memory. When the Minuteman II went into production in 1966, the D-17 was replaced with a new computer that was the first high-volume use of integrated circuits. This program alone reduced prices on quad nand gate ICs from $1000/each to $3/each, permitting their use in commercial products.
wapedia.mobi
So it looks as if I should have looked this up. It was a little later than what I remembered.
"I think you're confused on your dates. "
Nope.
"This would have been 1971, only 9 years -- and that was for an early LSI chip. "
Correct. So, from 1960 to 1971 is...
11 years. Or a bit more than a decade.
"Producing ICs for 800 missiles is not something any chip manufacturer would be excited about today."
Nope. But things have changed a bit. A quad NAND gate chip for $1000 in the early '60s found exactly 2 buyers. NASA and the Air Force. The same chip, a few years later for $25 found a few more. When they got down to less than a quarter, well...
"Manufacturers were a hell of a lot more interested in getting ICs into Zenith TV sets than they would ever have been about the Minuteman I."
If it wasn't for the missiles and it looks like I got the Minuteman I and II mixed up, they never would have developed the technology far enough to produce a chip that could go into a Zenith TV for a price that the market could bear. The government created a market that didn't exist. No manufacturer was big enough to put in a large enough investment to build the capacity to produce enough chips to make them cost effective.
Realize that the aforementioned NAND gate can be made with two transistors and a resistor. So the quad NAND IC had a grand total of 8 transistors and 4 resistors. Making something with dozens or hundreds of transistors suitable for those Zenith TVs was quite a few years away in 1960. And, even if it could be made, who was going to invest the money in a plant that can make enough of them to be cost effective? Especially with no experience in anything like volume production, which is a totally different regime than in a lab.
ICs were a chicken and egg problem. There was no way to get to the chicken without having a large enough market for companies to get the experience and know how to make chips in a reasonable enough volume to drive the price down.
It took the government to crack the egg. |
