More Chips, unknown manufacturers.

[tlccomp]

Anyone help in identifying these manufacturers and or chips?
I'm pretty sure they're custom makes.

[chip68]

The top two 40-pinners are made by Fairchild (see bottom left IC here, which is a DVM chip: http://home.comcast.net/~cwebster68/various.jpg ) - but they're house-numbered, so not much chance of finding info on them.

The "TTY" chip could be a keyboard encoder for a teletype terminal.

I'll let you know if I come up with anything on the rest.

- CMW

[metalmaker]

I believe the chip below the Fairchilds is manufactured by Western Electric (WE 379). I have seen other known Western Electric chips marked with "WE".

MM

[chip68]

Huh. I'm more accustomed to seeing their "WE" logo on transistors. One of Western Electric's earlier forays into computing, a shift register from 1959:



Really makes you appreciate large-scale integration...

- CMW

[metalmaker]

[chip68]

Funny, I would've said the 68000 was the first single-chip 32-bit microprocessor. That same Wikipedia article goes on to say:

"The most famous of the 32-bit designs is the MC68000, introduced in 1979. The 68K, as it was widely known, had 32-bit registers but used 16-bit internal data paths, and a 16-bit external data bus to reduce pin count. Motorola generally described it as a 16-bit processor, though it clearly has 32-bit architecture."

Which seems to contradict the paragraph above on the WE 32000. In fact, I recall the buzz about the 68000's 32-bit architecture when it first came out... I ordered this brochure from a Motorola rep the following year, in the spring of 1980:





Soon afterwards I ended up doing a couple 68000 (later, 68HC000) designs. Here's one of the prototypes, circa 1991:



Four AM27H010 EPROMs on that little beastie.

- CMW

[tlccomp]

Great "stuff"!

[chip68]

Yeah, I tend to agree that it has to do with register width. I always thought of the 6809, for instance, as a 16-bit processor.