Articles History of Electronics - 4

Louis Westphalen HODINKEE Throwback To The Past: it is 1977, quartz watches are still less than 10 years old; it's the year Star Wars hit theaters for the first time.. and you are actually looking at, not a piece of science fiction, but what ...

People have been converting digital-to-analog quantities for a long time. Probably among the earliest uses was the summing of calibrated weights (Figure A1, left) in weighing applications. Early electrical digital-to-analog conversion inevitably ...

Suzanne Deffree EDN It may have been April Fools’ Day, but Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne were not joking around when they came together on April 1, 1976, to form Apple Computer Inc to sell the Apple I personal computer kit. The ...

Nowadays, there are endless venues for a youngster to get into programming. In the early and mid 1970s less so! Thus, as best as my grey matter can recall, it was a desktop programmable calculator that became my first digital servant, sometime ...

I've taken a screwdriver to my rare and wonderful Wang LOCI-2 calculator This machine's design seems to be from 1965, though I estimate mine was made in 1967, the same year Young-Me trundled off on a barely-remembered trip to Expo '67 ...

By Graham Prophet EDN-Europe This little alarm clock very nearly qualifies as a family heirloom; it has performed uncomplainingly for around 35 years, and I would not have thought to dismantle it if it had not developed a slight fault. And in the ...

Dennis Feucht, Innovatia Laboratories EDN What makes a legacy IC? Here we take a look at some original parts and discuss why it might be a good idea to revisit their use. As electronics technology matures, it shows some signs of aging. As ...

Suzanne Deffree EDN Bell Labs and primarily William Shockley announced the invention of the junction transistor at a press conference in Murray Hill, NJ, the first week of July, 1951. Sources vary as to when the formal announcement was actually ...

Jack G. Ganssle Embedded Systems Design 64-bit CPUs and VLIW architectures slam massive amounts of data around via wide parallel buses. Processors today are so fast and so hungry for data that chip designers do horrible things to push bits into the ...