A Brief History of Chips - The Integrated Circuit Finds a Market

Integrated circuit technology has sometimes been cited as one of the alleged spin-off benefits of the money spent by NASA on the space program. The Apollo Guidance Computer advanced for the Space Program by the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory certainly created the first practical use of monolithic integrated circuits in an embedded computer -- 4100 of them actually, each having a single 3 input NOR logic gate in Resistor Transistor Logic technology. At same time Resistor Transistor Logic had been earlier used as discrete components, in fact IBM's 1401 PC addressed on October 5, 1959 used Resistor Transistor Logic and the more developed Diode Transistor Logic, both used as discrete components on printed circuit cards named Standard Modular System cards from IBM. A after version of the Apollo Guidance PC used around 2800 flat pack integrated circuit carriers, each one having 2-3 input NOR gates per flat pack. The PC also had 4K words of 15 data bits + 1 parity bit of RAM and between 12K and 32K words of ROM based on the version of PC. Wire-wrap interconnections were acreated to connect the socketed integrated circuits together.

The actual volume driver for these small-scale integration integrated circuits was the guidance computer for the Minuteman missile program which required these comparatively small lightweight devices in quantities adequate to push them into large production. The Minuteman program with the smaller Apollo program bought about all of the existing integrated circuits from 1960 to 1963, pushing the cost per integrated circuit from around 00 to about .

Mysteriously, in 1969, a member of the MIT Science Fiction Society, Russell Seitz, addressed that he had obtained the parts laving the nuclear warhead for a working ICBM. It appeared that as the solid fueled Minuteman missiles started to displace the previous era liquid fueled Atlas and Titan missiles, one of the previous era’s missiles was sold as scrap at public sale and he actually bought it from there. After all exposure, he disposed of the missile by giving it away to a museum.