[sdiy] Re: Bottom Ten ICs

[Richard Wentk]

Not enough geek cred to remember some of the exact numbers but:

Any chip used to play cheap and horrible squarewave tunes in greetings 
cards. Aaargh.

The big version of same with extra sound effects made by TI which some of 
you guys seem to think is cool but I always thought was stupid and pointless.

The 8088. Damn you to hell, Mr Grove.

That TI processor from the late 70s which kept could only ever keep 
internal registers in external memory. Duh.

The 555. Somehow it's always seemed just plain ugly.

High end SHARC DSP chips, because I always wanted to build something that 
used a bunch of them and could never afford to.

AVR anything. We had the elegant and sleek 68000 back in the mid 80s, so 
why hype a mediocre 8-bit sort of an architecture today?

LM301. Ick.

Antique TDAx series poweramps with THDs that always seemed to be >1% in 
real life applications.

8038. So much promise. So little delivery.

Top:
CEM/SSM. Almost all of them. Very cool.

68000. Very neat.

Z80. Another classic. The 6809 was cool too.

4017. Instant sequencer.

AMD Opteron range. Still with the x86 idea, but at least they're beginning 
to be fast enough to be useful as drop-in DSP substitutes.

6850. Not the best UART in the world, but many people's first into to MIDI 
hardware.

NE5532. An opamp with a decently sweet sound. Hurrah!

74382. I never did anything with one of these, but I always thought they 
looked fun.

Richard