Delete comment from: Ken Shirriff's blog
I started as a green EE in 1978 at a company called Ramtek, also of Sunnyvale. We used the 5300 PROM's among others, blowing them on a DataIO programmer. Shortly prior to my arrival they had started using MMI PAL's, one of the first companies to do so if not the first. This was before some marketing guy at MMI wrote PALSAM, so the RAMTEK engineers had to figure out all the 1's and 0's by hand. Ramtek was a spinoff of Data Disk, which had built bitmapped graphics displays using synchronized disk drives. Ramtek instead started out using Intel 1101 256bit static RAM's in the early 70's, buying parts cheaply that didn't meet spec (before my time, I could have that wrong). My first project was working on their low end product, a rack mount system that used 4kbit 4027 DRAM's to display 320x240 pixels in color on a 15khz CRT for maybe $5k. But the Apple II was out, the cheap CGA cards for the IBM PC were on the way, and the Ramtek 6110 was a very hard sell.
Nov 29, 2020, 10:25:02 PM
Posted to Looking inside a 1970s PROM chip that stores data in microscopic fuses