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from the digging-through-the-memory-banks dept.
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.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday August 12 2020, @09:59AM
Not to be confused with the Lovecraft Instrument Division (LID) of IBM in Innsmouth, MA. They made some bizarro organic processors from material recovered by the Pabodie expedition in 1930. It was used in the IBM 8300 that's buried under Ft.Meade from memory.