The content of the sectionem> The cognitive analyses of Functional Artifact
design is mainly based on what I remember of these developments since
the mid 60s, when we designed electronic functions with single transistors
and the first simple integrated circuits and we still made use of a few
applications on one of the vacuum tube based computers originally developed
at Philip's-Research. However, for a number of details, in particular the
years of announcement I have made use of various sources on the internet.
[see e.g. http://inventors.about.com, various websites of suppliers such as
analog devices; and of course wikipedia]. It is amazing that you can type in
just the well known type numbers of old electronis devices like 741, 8008
etc. and a number of useful links pop up. For the purpose of this subsection
only some main developments are mentioned. In retrospect this seems a
logical flow of developments. In practice many, sometimes fierce,
discussions took place when it came to decisions whether to move from triode
tube to junction transistors for serious applications. The discussions as
the transition from bipolar to MOS could be almost emotional (from what I
remember mainly on the bipolar side, I might be wrong here because I was at
the MOS side).
During my professional live I was involved in the development of internal
memory systems for mainframe computers, display terminals, multimeters,
chart recorders, and instrumentation systems, including the development of
specific integrated circuits. Later I have been involved in the technology
management, application systems architecture and information and automation
management.