[sdiy] monoliths and how we got to 2001

[Goddard, Duncan]

> >>>>Top octave divider chips showed up around 1969 or so, and everyone switched
> >over to them immediately.
> 
> wow,..I woulndt have thought they were available so early..  anyone know 
> when the first actual monolithi IC's appeared on the market, what was the 
> first one?
> Dan<<<
> 
> 
> first "chip" I saw was in a hifi book called "the a to z of hifi sound reproduction" which was published in 1958. at the time of going to press, the authors had little information but a very exciting photograph which they printed anyway. the picture showed a westinghouse engineer sitting behind a bench with a simple turntable (phonograph), a battery and a loudspeaker. in his hand, and connected to the three aforementioned, was a metal disc with a black lump about the size of a cigarrette packet and described in the caption as "the world's first solid state integrated circuit audio amplifier". I could never understand why it was almost twenty years before such devices were in common use for this purpose- did the tube manufacturers have big sicilian friends or something?
> 
> (it was probably invented in 1933 by mr blumlein; almost everything else of any use to hifi seems to be one of his ideas.)
> 
> I don't imagine that it was a great conceptual leap from producing quantities of transistors at a time, on one sheet of semiconductor material, to preordaining their purpose and interconnecting them in situ; I reckon that reliability problems probably made prefabrication of circuits in this manner uneconomical. if a sheet of transistors is made and the intention is to chop them off and use them separately, then a few failures could be tolerated (this is how sinclair got started- buying the rejects and testing them again) but if a sheet was designed as a circuit and cooked and then something failed.... there are other reasons too, to do with the concept of using small circuits in a modular fashion to create a bigger system; there must've been an element of mistrust in these early semiconductor devices that slowed their uptake, despite advantages in size, weight and power consumption.
> 
> and the eventual shift to lsi and vlsi had a deleterious effect on the uptake of electronics as a hobby by making it harder and harder to service one's toys without recourse to the manufacturer. so, back when hifi was still largely a hobby (i.e. before it became part of one's wallpaper) there would have been considerable pressure to maintain a "churn" of replacement parts, to fund further research. manufacturers didn't, and still don't, want the overheads of having to support their products if they can avoid it. in those days, folks changed their own tubes/cones/stylii/whatever, mostly without the need of a soldering iron. now, if y'r cd player packs up, you chuck it out (unless it was over $500). 
> 
d.



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