Amen

Rest In Peace Jack Kilby, and Thankyou.

I can honestly say that before today, I had never heard of anyone named Jack Kilby. But hey, if he helped create the greatest series of electronic devices of all time, I feel sad that he's gone.

Not just calculators, but everything and anything electronic.

Yeah, without him none of us would be here. We owe him a lot.

>> without him none of us would be here

Quite literally.

At least everything electronic that involves ICs, which I guess *is* just about everything more complex than a toaster. Wasn't he a co-founder of TI?

Even toasters have heat-control ICs now. Sounds like we owe a lot to him.

Who cares about toasters!

i do! i like to eat toasted bread!

Well I suppose it is possible because he was a ti pioneer so basically he could have been a co-founder of Texas Instruments. typically since he invented the Integrated circuit and they are used in calcs right? So it is possible and if anyone would tell me what an integrated circuit is please reply to this comment

Are you serious?
Thats alright.
Its a small package of solid state components that are placed in a ceramic or plastic case ranging from 8 to 64 pins (assuming its a linear integrated circuit)the individual components are etched from silicon wafers. Several million components can be fit into a single IC.
In the calculator it is used to store memory such as RAM and flash ROM

You can have fewer than 8 and many more than 64 pins... The processors are ICs too, and I know the P4 has upwards of 200 pins.

yeah I know for proccesors or for dual transistor they can be out of the range but they are not considered linear ICs, are they?

I guess you are correct though for an IC i should not have stated a range of pins

IC = microchip

well, you know what microchips are right? without them you wouldnt even be posting here. not a chance in heck of it (unless you can afford the 1 million individual transistors/vacuum tubes and ticalc.org can)

without computers, i'd probably have NO reasons to live. yes, i am that much of a geek :P

If they didn't exist, you wouldn't know you wanted to be a calc. nerd.

Depending upon one's reason for being a calculator nerd, one must remember that there were slide rules before electronic calculators.

I've even seen some FPGAs with >1000 pins...I feel sorry for the engineer who has to layout a board with one of those things on it...

Did He help invent the Graphing Calculator, cause it said he was a long time TI Engineer. Let's hope. And how old was he when he invented the integrated circuit. and what the heck is that anyway :(

An integrated circuit (I am going to call them IC's in this post) can be called the heart of basically any electronic device commonly used today. IC's contain at the minimum 2 interconnected semiconducter devices. They are microprocessors, which basically are the heart of electronic devices. Without them, computers would still run on vacuum tubes and would consume the size of an average room in a house.

<lecture to n00bs>
Close, but not quite... An IC is basically a bunch of transistors and resistors (and sometimes other componenets) etched into a tiny silicon wafer in a small package with pins connecting the internal circuit to external circuits. Look at it this way - a Z80 (one of the processors used in TI calcs) probably has thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of components. Of course, if you tried to put that many components separately on a board, it would be way to large to even lift by yourself, much less carry around in your pocket. But when the components are all shrunk and packed together in an IC, the whole things ends up much smaller and lighter.

IC != uP

Also, not EVERY device uses an IC - lamps and toasters, for example, don't require enough circuitry to make it worth using an IC (maybe some toasters have microcontrollers, but then the designers are idiots, since all they need is a simple bi-metallic switch!).
</lecture to n00bs>

Its pretty off topic, but does anybody know where I can purchase some 2sc9013 NPN transistors. I have searched and they are really hard to find. I have foud places that have them but I would need to order $500 worth. I need them to build the RF link. If anybody knows a substitution that I can use please tell me.

Pop into Maplin and ask them, or pick up an electronics mag and look in the ads in the back? I know EPE has ads for companies that can issue even rare transistors.

http://tinyurl.com/87k4d Care of Wikipedia.