1964 · Custom Integrated Circuits · Work 849 of 1,871
An incoming inspection room in an electronics plant in Anaheim in California, on a grey steel table a small square box of milky translucent plastic with twelve compartments in three rows of four, in each compartment a tiny white rectangular flat package six millimetres long with a thin gold rim and fine gold leads reaching out at both sides, every package plain smooth and unmarked, one package lifted out and held in a small spring clip by a hand in a short white shirt sleeve, a stereo microscope, a stack of ruled sheets lying face down, a bare pale green wall, bright daylight from tall windows on the left.
What it was used for
Autonetics, the guidance division of North American Aviation, needed circuits for the Minuteman II onboard computer that no catalogue offered. Texas Instruments won the contract in the autumn of 1962 and developed custom integrated circuits for it; the Computer History Museum calls it the industry's first major custom IC design programme. The museum object is dated 1964 and holds 12 circuits in a plastic case; it was a gift of Texas Instruments. Clevite and Westinghouse also developed circuits for the Minuteman programme, Westinghouse the linear part.
What was new
What was new was not the integrated circuit but the direction of design: not a maker offering logic blocks for a customer to assemble, but a customer having circuits developed to fit its own computer design. By the Computer History Museum's account this was the first major programme of the kind. By 1965 the Minuteman programme overtook NASA's Apollo procurement and became the largest single consumer of integrated circuits. The two largest customers of integrated circuits were thus the Apollo Moon programme and an intercontinental missile.
What the sources leave open: The Computer History Museum's object record and Silicon Engine page give different counts of custom circuits: 13 in the object record, 22 on the Silicon Engine page. Neither text gives production figures, prices or the number of circuits per computer. That Westinghouse supplied the linear part is stated in Ed Sack's account for the same museum.
Connections
Every connection names its kind. “Forerunner” on its own would be a claim.