A hobby corner on a winter evening in a flat in Saxony, on a pale grey laminate desk top the open inner drawer of a small plain unprinted cardboard matchbox of rough grey-beige card, inside it two grey plastic chips nineteen millimetres long, each plain, smooth and unmarked with seven short silvery legs along each side, one lying upside down, a hand in a brown knitted sleeve holding tweezers above a half- built circuit board of brown pressboard, a stack of closed plain unprinted matchboxes, a soldering iron in a wire stand with a thin thread of smoke, a desk lamp with a metal shade throwing light from the left.
What it was used for
In 1971 the TTL gate of the 7400 series was the building block of published circuits: in the Designers casebook column of Electronics of 19 July 1971 a symmetrical divider counter is built from a quarter of an SN7400N together with an SN7474N and an SN7451N. Electronics wrote in early 1971 that with such low prices many systems houses were replacing mechanical designs and discretes with TTL. In 1972 the business came from computer building: in its outlook for 1973 Electronics reports that TTL prices firmed and big computer contracts came rolling in. In British retail in 1972 the 7400 quadruple gate cost 12 to 20 pence depending on dealer and quantity, that is about 3 to 5 pence per gate.
What was new
1971 is not the year the TTL gate appeared but the year it became bulk goods. Texas Instruments was already advertising Series 54 in May 1966, with a military version 54 and an industrial 74, out of 130 standard TI integrated-circuit types overall; Sylvania was earlier, and Electronics writes in early 1971 that TI stole the TTL banner from Sylvania, which was first with its SUHL product line. New in TI's range in 1966 was a molded package designed for economical high-speed assembly and testing, with 14 plug-in pins on 100-mil centres, rows 300 mils apart, with an index notch for automatic insertion. The barb: the part became so cheap that it dismantled its own industry, and its originator first - in early 1971 Electronics reports that many in the industry saw the demise of the semiconductor division of Sylvania Electric Products as just the beginning of the shakeout, and 2 years later the same magazine reports that so many suppliers had already left the business that the few big ones remaining were reaping the big profits.
What the sources leave open: No product, package form or advertisement using the word matchbox for TTL gates could be documented; full-text searches of Electronics from 1965 to 1973 and of British magazines of 1972/73 find the word only in other contexts. The title therefore cannot be pinned to any named product. A production figure in units for 1971 is missing; what is documented are dollar sales and relative growth. European and Soviet second sources were not examined.