7400 Series - History

History

Although the 7400 series was the first de facto industry standard TTL logic family to be second-sourced by several semiconductor companies, there were earlier TTL logic families such as the Sylvania SUHL (Sylvania Universal High-level Logic) family, Motorola MC4000 MTTL family (not to be confused with RCA CD4000 CMOS), the National Semiconductor DM8000 family, Fairchild 9300 series, and the Signetics 8200 family.

The 7400N quad NAND gate was the first product in the series.

The 5400 and 7400 series were used in many popular minicomputers in the seventies and early eighties. The DEC PDP series 'minis' used the 74181 ALU as the main computing element in the CPU. Other examples were the Data General Nova series and Hewlett-Packard 21MX, 1000, and 3000 series.

Hobbyists and students equipped with wire wrap tools, a 'breadboard' and a 5-volt power supply could also experiment with digital logic referring to how-to articles in Byte magazine and Popular Electronics which featured circuit examples in nearly every issue. In the early days of large-scale IC development, a prototype of a new large-scale integrated circuit might have been developed using TTL chips on several circuit boards, before committing to manufacture of the target device in IC form. This allowed simulation of the finished product and testing of the logic before the availability of software simulations of integrated circuits.

In 1965, typical quantity-one pricing for the SN5400 (military grade, in ceramic welded flat-pack) was around 22 USD. As of 2007, individual commercial-grade chips in molded epoxy (plastic) packages can be purchased for approximately 0.25 USD each, depending on the particular chip. Purchased in bulk the price per unit falls even lower.