Mon 24 Dec 2007
Reading Bob Pease’s website can be both enlightening as well as entertaining as he recounts the ‘creation’ of the Signetics 9046xN Random Access Write Only Memory. To make a long story short, an engineer in the 1970s got fed up with filling out massive amounts of paperwork when writing datasheets that was not being looked over so he created the write only memory mentioned above. The datasheet can (found here and here) got approved and added into products catalogs from Signetics which were distributed to customers. The management teams realized that the chip was fake (and probably read the datasheet for the first time) when customers started inquiring about pricing and availability. In the end, Signetics decided to take a humorous approach and pay to have the datasheet published as a two-page April fools joke in Electronics Magazine. It seems that many companies have begun to focus on streamlining internal paperwork which would hopefully lead to less disgruntled engineers, however, companies these days seem to have less tolerance for humor. With the ease of on-line publishing, every single company that has any visibility is subjected to some level of ridicule and often makes matters worse by sending cease and desist notices. This makes knowing the difference between parody and libel that much more important than ever.
( wom.pdf )
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Ahhh. Memories.
I was working in NatSemi’s Microprocessor group when this came out and it created no end of hilarity for us. (This is the same time frame when NatSemi was releasing Fast Buffers and Damn Fast Buffers as products.)
What made the press release for the WOM especially funny was the photo they used for the packaging. They used a photo of the Sunnyvale water tower – which at the time, bore an amazing resemblance to the early 10-legged memory cans. The enormous size of the “packaging” bolstered the capacity requirements for a device such as a WOM because you definitely needed a lot of space to retain all those bits.
Hi Doug,
If you still happen to have access to any of that material and would like to post it, either leave a comment or send an email. I am sure that others will enjoy it!