The Forgotten Ones: HP Nanoprocessor
An Anonymous Coward writes:
The Forgotten Ones: HP Nanoprocessor:
Back in the 1970's the Loveland Instrument Division (LID) of HP in Colorado, USA was the forefront of much of HP's computing innovation. HP was a leader, and often THE leader in computerized instrumentation in the early 1970's. From things like calculators, to O-scopes to desktop computers like the 9825 and 9845 series. HP made their own processors for most all of these products. The early computers were based on the 16-bit Hybrid processor we talked about before. At around the same time, in 1974, the HP LID realized they needed another processor, a control oriented processor that was programmable, and could be used to control the various hardware systems they were building. This didn't need to be a beast like the 16-bit Hybrids, but something simpler, inexpensive, and very fast, it would interface and control things like HPIB cards, printers, and the like. The task of designing such a processor fell to Larry Bower.
The result was a Control Oriented Processor called the HP nanoprocessor. Internally it was given the identifier 94332 (or 9-4332), not the most elegant name, but its[sic] what was on the original prototypes and die. The goal was to use HP's original 7-micron NMOS process (rather then the new 5-micron NMOS-II process) to help save costs and get it into production quickly.
The story has several pictures of the early DIP chips as well as handwritten block diagrams and hand-corrected data sheets.
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