Just wondering (Motorola)

[ocelotl]

I was wondering... Dennis, Was I somehow an indirect client of you all this time?

And, just checking the attachment feature.

[yogi]

Thank you for verifying the attachment feature. Apparently it actually works.

Motorola was big in the early semiconductor manufacturing industry. I guess they invented a few things in that area too. But, as was typical for the company, they excelled in developing cutting edge technology and then dropping the ball. This behavior was especially noticeable in the consumer products sector. For all the great innovations Motorola brought to market, today in 2021 most of them are owned by other companies. Even the Motorola signature cell phone is owned by Lenovo. So it was with semiconductors. To be honest I don't know if Motorola actually published or sold any of those books on your shelf, but they did provide the documentation. If you used any of it, and who didn't, then I'd agree that you were a customer while I was employed there. The semiconductors, however, were mainly manufactured in Arizona while I worked in Illinois around the Chicago area. It was all the same company, but they were spread all over the globe.

[ocelotl]

This thread opened the memory lane... Yep, I still have around a couple dozen printed Motorola Application Notes that were my reference for several stuff I was commisioned to develop... Remember that some of the Motorola semiconductors I bought in the early '90s, in my University years, came from Arizona, others from Philipines, others from Taiwan and a very few from the "El Salto" plant, the case marks surely would refer to the final assembly facility...
Back then mostly the available competition in DIP packaging down here was Texas Instruments, National Semiconductor, NEC, Hitachi, SGS Thompson and Samsung in logic and analog low power semiconductors. Yep, they developed a lot of stuff, and kept most of us unsuspicing costumers loyal to the brand for a long time, until it all was dismantled... I still search first within the "Onsemi" brand and then the rest...

[yogi]

I was just a lab technician and didn't get into the product development cycle. I did see a lot of the products Motorola manufactured and can say there was a lot of silicon in them that did not come from inside the company. I seem to recall TI and National Semiconductors being prominent, but there were others too. Most of the transistors were Motorola brand, but the digital logic came from anybody who had the right device for our needs. I think Motorola made high quality products, but when the competition kicked in we could not be competitive. The labor costs in this country were too high.