Semiconductor History

During the mid 1970s, there was a pong-on-a-chip development happening at General Instrument's facility in Glenrothes, Scotland. It was discovered by Ralph Baer, who got it designed into the Coleco Telstar, launched in 1976. It played six games, but only three were offered in Coleco's first product. The GI device was the first single IC to offer multiple games and was made available to every manufacturer, launching home video games as a mass market. It marked the end of discrete systems such as the Magnavox x00 products. The Coleco Telstar was a highly integrated system with only a few external discretes for the GI chip. In 1976 GI were selling the chip in volume for £6 (£40 today) into games that were £30 (£198 today) at the low end. By 1977 GI had a range of game ICs, including car racing, card games, submarine and other ball and paddle variants. It also offered the CP1600 microprocessor for programmable games consoles. The CP1600 eventually became the PIC micro, which has si...

The IBM System/360 mainframe development which started in 1961 was the biggest product development in corporate history. Costing $5B at the time ($44B today), it was a huge gamble, but it paid off handsomely for IBM. They dominated the market for the remainder of the mainframe computer era. There were several big innovations which created its success, including, upwards/downwards software compatibility across the range, standard interface for many different peripherals, emulation of other platform developed software, adoption of the 8-bit byte and Solid Logic Technology. Seen in close up, SLT was a ceramic substrate technology with printed resistors and mounted transistors, creating Resistor Transistor Logic (RTL) blocks. The resistors were trimmed before the lid was put on the modules. IBM gambled in large part because they were facing increasing stiff competition. One of their competitors launched a product with early logic integrated circuits. IBM had considered this but felt the te...