welash

The wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_personal_computers cites an article called "Most Important Companies" from the September 1995 issue of byte, but the link is broken. I'm not sure if that was the first reference or not.

I found the data sheet on www.datasheetarchive.com. Just search for tms2564. The two parts you listed are really the same part. The MEP8349 and RTI8323 look like datecode and fab information. The first was probably built in the 49th week of 1983 and the second in the 23rd week of 1983. I'm not sure about the 3 letter prefix, but it probably tells which fabrication plant it was built at. The JL is the package suffix, which just tells you it is a ceramic dip, and the 35 is the speed grade, 350 ns. I'm not sure how much they are worth to people, to program them, you would probably need an EPROM programmer (you need to supply a programming voltage of 25 volts). They are probably more rare than 2764s, which I think should be drop in replacements. BG Micro has 2764s for a few dollars a piece.

Tor, Is the article you are talking about the one on page 452 of the May 1983 issue? It is titled "A Conceptual Approach to Real-Time Programming" and talks about modeling realtime systems as running on several processors, and then implementing the mutiple processors on a single processor. I just read the intro, and it sounds interesting. Bill

I'm one of the new people. I registered here yesterday just so I could say hi and thanks for doing this great service for the whole retrocomputing community. I'm fairly active in the Commodore 8-bit community since several years but I have a general interest in all classic computers, especially the 8-bitters from the 70s and 80s. I've been looking for PDFs of Byte Magazine for a long time and a Google search a few weeks ago brought me here. I'm particularly interested in the early days of homebrew systems and kit computers so having access to Byte issues from the mid to late 70s is a dream come true. I'm also a newbie. I saw a posting mentioning this site on www.dangerousprototypes.com which I believe is a fairly popular site, so maybe that is part of the influx. I've always regretted throwing out my old issues of Byte, thanks for letting me re-live those simpler days.