As I recall, there were few HP peripherals on the old bench until I built a rack and stack sequential device tester that supported handlers. None of the old equipment had IEEE488 GPIB interface bus. Much of the new equipment in my rack and stack was HP equipment, all had GPIB.
We used to make the full complement of decoder/drivers at my local Fairchild facility and later at Nat Semi. The internal part name for 74141 was , IIRC.
That's pretty cool. I missed the era where 74 series stuff was designed.
Man, those designs look so simple today! Towards the end of my career I was supporting Cyrix MediaGX and M2 uPs - around the 200mHz-300mHz period of the uP wars. We were faster than AMD for a few months, then in #3 position and losing ground. National Semi had no business being in the uP business - under funded, under staffed, pushing the limits of our fab. You wouldn't believe the stress levels of a uP test engineer during the CPU wars.
The old Cyrix stuff. Last one of those I used was National Semiconductor's Geode CPU on a PC/104 board. It seemed to work fairly well, there's still a metric shitton of the boards I chose out there in the now defunct company's product.
I ran one of those for years as my "mini server" until the SBC revolution started with the Pi.
FAST(Mxxx devices) devices (Fairchild Advanced Schottky Technology) were the current hot thing when I first started. A couple of years later we introduced FACT (Cxxx) devices (Fairchild Advanced CMOS Technology) along with the first AC/DC test platforms in the house, the MCT2000 based on x86. Then National bought Fairchild and they pared down the duplicate device offerings. In most cases they kept the Fairchild parts and discontinued the equivalent National part. Those MCT2000s were real workhorses. We upgraded the CPUs every couple of years to reduce test time.
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