Z80 Testing the 80s Way
According to [MTSI], if you used a Z80 chip back in the 1980s, it almost certainly passed through the sole Fairchild Sentry 610 system that gave it the seal of …read more Continue reading Z80 Testing the 80s Way
Category Archives: fairchild
Hackaday Links: March 26, 2023
Sad news in the tech world this week as Intel co-founder Gordon Moore passed away in Hawaii at the age of 94. Along with Robert Noyce in 1968, Moore founded …read more Continue reading Hackaday Links: March 26, 2023
Jerry Lawson And The Fairchild Channel F; Father of the Video Game Cartridge
The video game console is now a home entertainment hub that pulls in all forms of entertainment via an internet connection, but probably for most readers it was first experienced as an offline device that hooked up to the TV and for which new game software had to be bought …read more
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The Dual In-Line Package and How It Got That Way
For most of human history, our inventions and innovations have been at a scale that’s literally easy to grasp. From the largest cathedral to the finest pocket watch, everything that went into our constructions has been something we could see with our own eyes and manipulate with our hands. But in the middle of the 20th century, we started making really, really small stuff: semiconductors. For the first time, we were able to create mechanisms too small to be seen with the naked eye, and too fine to handle with our comparatively huge hands. We needed a way to scale …read more
Continue reading The Dual In-Line Package and How It Got That Way
The 555 and How It Got That Way
There’s a certain minimum set of stuff the typical Hackaday reader is likely to have within arm’s reach any time he or she is in the shop. Soldering station? Probably. Oscilloscope? Maybe. Multimeter? Quite likely. But there’s one thing so basic, something without which countless numbers of projects would be much more difficult to complete, that a shop without one or a dozen copies is almost unthinkable. It’s the humble 555 timer chip, a tiny chunk of black plastic with eight leads that in concert with just a few extra components can do everything from flashing an LED a couple …read more
Retrotechtacular: AM Radios, Core Memory, And Color TV, What Was Hot In Chips In ’73
As part of writing tech stories such as those we feature here at Hackaday, there is a huge amount of research to be done. We trawl through pages and pages of obscure blogs, videos, and data sheets. Sometimes we turn up resources interesting enough that we file them away, convinced that they contain the nucleus of another story at some point in the future.
Today’s topic of entertainment is just such a resource, courtesy of the Internet Archive. It’s not a video as we’d often provide you in a Retrotechtacular piece, instead it’s the February 1973 edition of the Fairchild …read more
The uA723 As A Switch Mode Regulator
If you are an electronic engineer or received an education in electronics that went beyond the very basics, there is a good chance that you will be familiar with the Fairchild μA723. This chip designed by the legendary Bob Widlar and released in 1967 is a kit-of-parts for building all sorts of voltage regulators. Aside from being a very useful device, it may owe some of its long life to appearing as a teaching example in Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill’s seminal text, The Art Of Electronics. It’s a favourite chip of mine, and I have written about it …read more