National Semiconductor: "Animals of Silicon Valley" 

Used to love National Semiconductor products. They had great app notes and data books. And Bob Pease was a legend.

In the 1970's, after a career in electronics repair, I became a new electronics product design engineer. An engineer needs data books and application guides on chips. The major chip companies then were Motorola, Texas, Fairchild, and National Semiconductor. Texas delivery times were way too long. Philips was trying to nibble away at the edges. So I asked the local reps for Motorola, Fairchild, and Nat Semi for data books and application guides. The Motorola guy refused to give me anything, saying he had supplied the company Head Office library. Fat lot of good that is - an engineer needs everything to hand at all times. The Fairchild guy gave me a TTL data book and a TTL app guide. The Nat Semi guy gave me a truck load of data books and manuals. Extensive literature on each chip showing how to use it and get the beast out of it. And quoted lower prices and faster delivery than Fairchild. Guess which brand of chips got used the most in the products I designed .....

That is so neat that your Father worked for Semi. He sure raised a bright and hard working son. I'm sure he is very proud of you. Thanks for all your work. One of the very BEST youtube channels!

Pretty wild, small world. I now work at a national fab that was purchased by Texas instruments and worked with some guys in salt lake that left Fairchild when it shut down. Great job on these videos man, I feel like I learn more from you about my work than from working there myself

I was a test engineer at National Semi in 1972. Bob Widlar's original tester for the LM-105 regulator was a metal box that would only work if it was tipped on its right side. We never figured out why. The techs used to open bottles of nitrogen on hot summer days to cool off the test floor and we used a PDP-8 minicomputer to drive the testers. It had a RIM memory that had to be sequentially programmed by toggle switches from the front panel. It was a perfect drunk test. Miss one command and start over. So we trained a line girl to do it se we could enjoy multiple beers for lunch. Those were wild days!

The essays "Pease Porridge" on analog circuit design written by Bob Pease of National Semiconductor in "Electronic Design" monthly magazine were fantastic teaching and revelation which led me to the electronics industry. I have spent many hours while reading the thick NS product data book to learn and to get new ideas on analog circuits. I own a lot to wonderful engineers of National Semiconductor.

I worked as a maintenance tech at the Danbury, CT plant from summer of 1984 until they closed it in 1990. Good people, fun place to work, and while there added to my electronics knowledge learning a lot about vacuum systems, compressed gasses and plenty of other things that have served me well ever since.

If I were your dad I'd be proud. Nice job.

National data books and app notes were great. I still have lots of them.

Robert Pease also worked there in their heyday. He was recruited from Philbrick, which introduced the first operational amplifier modules (vacuum tube), and was quite the personality and application engineer.

I don't remember anyone calling the company by its full name - it was always just Nat Semi. And Bob Widdler was the Hunter S Thompson of analogue - widdlerising failed components with a large hammer has been a standard technique at a couple of places I worked. I've met a few of the heroes from the Valley's golden era, but I'd swap any five for an evening in a bar with him.

5:26 That's the Plymouth Plessey Semiconductors factory, which is still very much in business. I used to work there, I can just see myself walking up that side entrance to the Test Area which used to be there.

Thanks for all the work you put into creating these videos. There aren’t many channels that tell these stories in such depth.

THANK, YOU SO MUCH FOR BRINGING LOTS OF GOOD MEMORIES BACK. I WORKED AT NS IN THE SINGAPORE PLANT. SPOCK VISITED US MANY TIMES. HE IS REALLY REVERED IN NATIONAL. NS PROVIDED MANY SINGAPORE ANS ON THE FIESTY, JOB EDUCATION THAT ARMED US FOR LIFE AFTER NATIONAL. I CAN SPEAK FOR MOST OF US...WE ARE REALLY GRATEFUL FOR NATIONAL. WE HAD EX - NS GET TOGETHERS OFTEN AND JUST RECENTLY IN OCT 2022 WE HAD ONE WITH ABOUT 150 OLD EX NS FOLKS REMINICING THE GOOD OLD ANIMALS OF SILICON VALLEY DAYS!!! GOOD JOB ON THE VIDEO. WHATS YOU FATHERS NAME INCIDENTLY?.... OLD TIMERS LIKE ME MAY KNOW HIM!!!

NS will always hold a special place in my heart. As a student hobbyist, NS was incredible since they offered free samples from pretty much every part they offered. Many of my hobby projects used NS parts simply because of that program. To this day I will still gravitate to an NS part as first instinct.

This company was my goto for analog circuits. Their application notes were legendary.

Sounds like potential for a Documentary like pirates of Silicon Valley

The dedication to your dad is a nice touch ❤

I worked for the UKs largest independent semiconductor company (and fab) in the UK, Semelab and Semefab. SML now owned by TT Electronics. Going to do a potted history on SML and hope to do half as good a job as you did. Well done.

By the way, could you do an episode on the economic expectations of the 2022 chip act? Thatnk and your father is a good man.

Nice work. Widlar and Pease were characters.

@Asianometry - I lost my dad a year ago... He was 85 and worked in aviation. His company is also gone, but the things that he taught me about tech, covering your ass, and common sense are invaluable. His greatest legacy is me taking the time to teach it to my kids, but also the young men I work with who do not have a competent father or have no father at all in the home. Thank you to your dad and to mine for their time, wisdom, and vigorous efforts toward excellence. Love your channel and videos.

My parents met eachother while working for National Semiconductor!!! I miss my Dad very much - he was a brilliant, wonderful person who worked there in the early 80s - Robert/Bob Preston - we lived in San Jose until he got recruited to work for Kellogg in BC Michigan sometime around 1986. This was a great documentary - thank you so much for the experience 🙏 Outstanding work ❤️

NS ic data books and applications are top notch. Your dad raised you right.

Dave Talbert is my uncle. I'm going through lots of pictures and letters that my grandparents kept, and it has me looking for more. He was a bit introverted, so he isn't mentioned as much as Bob Widlar is. Thanks for the mention.

I worked at National Santa Clara as a Product Engineer from 1983-1986, then worked in South Portland Maine until they were bought by TI in 2011. I worked with Charlie Sporck's son in Santa Clara. Halla killed off the company by raising chip prices so high that the biggest customers got so mad they redesigned their systems to eliminate all NSC chips. Revenue tanked, factories became underutilized, and we became a sitting duck for a takeover by TI.

I loved National Semiconductor in the 70’s and 80’s. As a kid their data books and papers authored by Lidler taught me more about electronics and engineering than anything else. Beautiful texts - thank you to your Dad.

I joined Sequent Computer Systems when they were transitioning from NS 32000 (their "Balance" line of SMP systems) to Intel i386 CPUs (their "Symmetry" line). I hadn't worked with the NS 32000 CPU before then but at the time thought its architecture (like the Motorola 68K) was superior to that of the Intel i386.Sadly, superiority on paper is often less important than other considerations.

Bob Widler (Wide-ler) produced miracle chips. Bob Pease explained how to use them to the engineers trying to use them. One without the other would have left NSC a toothless tiger or a tigerless tooth. Those days were really fun for engineers who used NSC chips. {^_^}

There are a lot of companies that depend on a founder (or in National Semi, a re-founder) who is quite successful at first and then fails to move with the times. National Semi seems to be one of these. AMD managed to have a life after Jerry Sanders, for instance. Apple is a unicorn in that one of its founders returned to restore the company not only to success, but to domination. Sporck was too dominant for too long, it appears.

I've always had a soft spot for National. I pretty much learned digital design from my father's copy of the Nat Semi TTL Databook. Was genuinely sorry when I heard that they had been swallowed up by TI.

Ah, NS. When I began my career in electronics [in the early 80s] I also started collecting semiconductor data books, and by 1985 I amassed the entirety of National Semiconductor's library 😁

National, before the end, did release a solid lineup of new audio opamps and power opamps. TI maintained the low signal lineup, but the power chips were all replaced by TI's digital power amp lineup.

Wonderful telling of a great Silicon Valley story, thanks.

I don't know when your Dad worked there, but NSC was a supplier for me during my time in Finland, working with the "Grass Valley Boys" and the Oulu design teams, with several hundreds of millions of devices... Had a great relationship with them, and, personally, have been using their devices since 1974!

Thanks for putting this together. Was there from 99 till it was sold. Lots of memory of the awesome folks that had worked there, some are already gone.

My dad worked for national semi conductor for 25 years. Thank you for this video!

I’m sure your Father is very proud of your prodigious output of incredibly professional mini documentaries with what I am assuming is a very small production staff ie. 1 🏆

The dedication to your dad is a nice touch . Wonderful telling of a great Silicon Valley story, thanks..

I am there as IT system engineer from 92-95. At Melaka, Malaysia factory. It was great, I got to play with Sun Microsystems workstation, managed lines of servers that collect data for the testing equipment (LTX, Teradyne), get to involve in projects to monitor and control baking, wafer dicing process, introduce some automation. good time. Thanks for the video.

I do miss national semi

In defence of Plessey, it looks like Plessey was well ahead of NS, and they actually wanted to know what NS knew about semi-conductors ! - 'Plessey produced an early integrated circuit model in 1957, before the patents of Jack St. Clair Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce of Fairchild' (from Wiki)

Just to say that Sprague is pronounced "Spray-ge" and they used to run ads in the magazines "Don't be vague-- Specify Sprague!" Also note the 1600 microprocessor wasn't really an NS product, it was second-sourced by NS from General Instrument. They did that only after NS introduced their SC/MP "Scamp" microprocessor in '76 or so and had it fail completely on the market.

As a retired EE thanks for the trip down memory lane. I remember the picture of Widlar at 13:12.

I've been hoping for this episode for so long now. I love NatSemi. Back when there were so many different companies in the market.

Great video. In 1973 after a year at TI I started at National where I worked in the digital TTL (5400/7400) area as a design engineer and then a product engineer until I transferred to West Jordan (what's known as the Salt Lake plant) in 1980. I was in charge of the test area in West Jordan until I quit and moved back to Florida in 1983. I have often wondered what happened to National after I left. The West Jordan plant was on a downhill slide and Santa Clara didn't seem to be going anywhere so I wasn't happy so I left. It seemed I would be able to ski my behind off when I moved to West Jordan but the weather was awful often closing the roads to the ski areas all weekend. Moving turned out good for me as I got a job as an electronics engineer at the Space Center and worked there until I retired in 1999. Thanks again for the video.

Are you ready to share your thought on Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro, and Kirin 9000s?

Nice job.... around 20:20 you talked about the shift to specialized ICs for customers, like me... I worked on, I think, 6 new devices in 4-5 years, a couple of them were in 200 million quantities, and several are still in production today... Not bad, about 15 years in production in today's semiconductor business!

Hi, John. I’m working in a utility company and came across a very old piece of equipment. The manual says “National Semiconductor LF155 amplifier and buffers”. I don’t think your father happened to design it, but it worth checking. lol How coincidental that I watched the video and then bumped into this in my project.

Had a computer system with the NS32016 CPU in 1988 (by Acorn, UK). I have fond memories of that. Even did some assembly programming on it, just for the fun of it. That CPU was every bit as nice as the Motorola 68000, both so much nicer than contemporary Intel CPUs.

Loved this video - the stories about Bob Widlar got me to buy Charlie Sporck's "Spinoff" book and it was very interesting reading. Keep up the great work man!

I thought that National’s focus was Mil-Spec components? I moved to Silicon Valley in 1980. It was such an exciting place. The want ads on Sunday required two folios, each of which consisted of six sheets. A rocket ride.

NS assembly plants were not just in Singapore before. They do have one in Cebu, Philippines and still have in Penang, Malaysia.

My dad worked at National Semiconductor's Santa Clara office as well, from 1989 until 1999. I remember the park well, but wish I could find old photos of it.

@13:29 I see what you did there, and I approve! They have so many things on their menu, I'm sure the chips are on there somewhere.

Really enjoyed this. I worked at Signetics as a die attach inspector on second shift during my senior year of high school in Orem Utah. After moving to California to live w my sister and brother in law while he attended Stanford, I worked at Fairchild as a dishwasher after graduating. I hoped to get a tech position but that didn’t happen. I did wash a lot of dishes and got to know people as I worked in the cafeteria. Some of them may be same as discussed in the video. After my first year of college I worked at National Semiconductor as a step and repeat operator at their plant in West Jordan Utah. I then went to college to get my EE degree. During summers I interned at Varian Associates in Palo Alto as a radar tube tech.

I remember seeing National Semiconductor's talking cash registers as a kid in Texas. HEB was their biggest customer there.

Another awesome video!! 13:15 is the best photo I’ve ever seen.

I remember National very well indeed, Did contract work in a couple of their older fabs and also in their Fairchild Research Center in Santa Clara. I was a staff process engineer, starting up, dialing in and doing process development on many of their plasma etch tools. They weren't easy people to work with, to say the least. I worked with some of the Cyrix engineers as well, and they too were very difficult people. Never satisfied, always complaining, changing the rules every other day, the list goes on and on. One morning I came in to start another day, expecting another stressful time in paradise. Instead of jumping on me as usual, they all had glazed looks of shock on their faces. The Cyrix thing had just been closed down and they were all about to lose their jobs. A bad day for them but a huge relief for me, I'm sad to say. Quite a memory. I worked in all the major fabs in the Valley: Intel ... AMD ... National ...Signetics ... Synertek ... LSI Logic ... VLSI Technology ... Synergy ... HP ... Paradigm ... Silicon Systems ... Orbit ... at least those are the ones I can remember. There were more that have just slipped my mind. I worked in semiconductors from 1978 to 2004.

I used to work at National Semiconductor Tucson, Az, back in 1980 or around. I met Vada, Childress, and a lot other kind persons.

I was in college when National was at its height. I actually encouraged some friends to get a job there, once they completed their BSEE degrees. I already had a job lined up elsewhere. If not, I probably would have sent some resumes there, too. Bad timing, that ended with me giving bad advice, since shortly thereafter, National started their long term slide, finally getting swallowed up by TI, a couple of decades later. Always looked at them as an analog parts company. Yes, I used a lot of TTL (and TTL compatible 74HC CMOS), but programmable logic from PALs to CPLDs to FPGAs where coming in vogue, at the high end. At the low end microcontrollers where finding their ways into everything. So boards with 30 or more TTL chips were going away. I wire-wrapped dozens of prototypes, filled with TTL parts, gluing together a half dozen, or so, large NMOS ICs, such as the processor, various controllers (DMA, Interrupt, timers, ...), along with memory chips (RAM [SRAM & DRAM] & ROM [EPROM & EEPROM]), when I was still a tech, working my way thru school. National only made half hearted attempts in programmable logic & uC areas.

15:08 That ad! It has big John Romero Daikatana/Genesis Does energy.

Speaking of dads- mine worked as a chip designer at apple around the time of the original Mac. You want me to see if you can interview him?

[in a tone of astonishment] Wow! *This is remarkable!* This is something I can personally relate to, as I worked at NS back in the early 1980s in the mail room and did courier work several times a month to the executive work area that Charlie Sporck occupied . . . and I do mean *_work area,_* as it was an open air floorspace, larger than a basketball court or two, with cubicles . . . _there were no individual offices [to my knowledge] to be had on the premises!_ Sporck did not lavish himself with an office, but rather, it was an open-air cubicle at the top floor of a massive building in Santa Clara. From the appearance of the interior workspace setting, you would have thought that Sporck was nothing more than a department supervisor, possibly a small department manager, from the austere open cubicle layout, with a non-descript desk, and an off-the-shelf swivel office chair [of what looked like a 1950s style], with arms, that would have looked at home in the environs of a warehouse office or police station dating back decades earlier. Any employee with an NS ID badge could have easily walked right up to Sporck's desk! The exterior of that NS building Sporck occupied . . . now, mind you, it's been 40 years, but the "number two" building designation resonates in my brain. Well, that massive gray multi-storied building had an ominous look to it, something George Lucas could have used as exterior shots for the HQ of "The Empire" in a Star Wars movie. I appreciated the narrative in this video of informing the viewers of NS being [ahem!] 'frugal,' as that was a lasting impression the company left with me. Myself and others that worked there lamented about the cheapness of NS, especially when it came to the quality of the manufactured chips. A legend that spread in the social circles I was in about NS's efforts when it came to manufacturing quality: _Instead of NS putting in the efforts to manufacture 1K of high quality chips that would meet stringent specs; it would produce multiple-thousands of cheap chips, then toss out those thousands that didn't meet the specs, until they got the 1K quantity that met the specs. The logic behind that was with the cost and resources it took to strive for high-quality manufacturing; as, in the minds of the NS execs, it was more profitable to mass-produce cheap chips with some waste than to produce high-quality chips with no-waste._ Mind you, the above about chip quality was just chatter around NS, as I have no way to substantiate it. But, it does hint of the underlying morale issues there were in some sectors in NS.

For Your Dad. Since more than a year maybe even two years, i'm watching every opisode. Good Job

Thanks for the awesome video! Please do. A video about the failure of the 16000 and de 32000 microprocessor lines.

13:05 I love that picture. I often use that saying. Mostly because my love of electronics is old tube gear.

Great story... and special dedication at the end.. well done...

2:34 Why didn't they give the finished chips to the company who won the lawsuit so they could decide themselves if they wanted to destroy or sell them?

My cousin also worked for NS in Santa Clara office. I remember NS gave free entrance tickets for Great America in Santa Clara to their employees including their family for either Christmas or the company's anniversary.

Widlar and his antics are probably enough material for a video on its own. He really was a character unlike any other, and he got things forward.

I worked during my uni summers at Nat Semi in Gourock, Scotland in the 4 inch analog fab as a process engineer. It was still all manual handling with no implanters. They then built the 6 inch fab with implanters, robotic furnaces. I had a guaranteed job on Graduation but then the bastards had a hiring freeze so none of us got picked up.

My grandfather, Jack Mills, worked at the plant in Arlington Texas. My mother also worked there for quite some time so national definitely holds a special place in my heart as well! I remember hearing tales of John Conn. (Funny enough my grandfather started at Fairchild and left to join NSC!)

Even though you’ve made quite a few videos piecing together the history of Fairchild, I’m surprised you’ve never made a dedicated video about such a pivotal company!

Every time I heard "Sporck" I thought of those spoon-fork combo utensils that Taco Bell offers. Sorry, it's me not you, Jon. Another good video btw!

Charles Sporck had an intriguing combination of two of the most popular eating utensils named after him that are found in many places that sell quick food. What a legacy this man has 🌮

Very nice for you to dedicate this video to your father!

Your dad had an amazing son. Bravo! 😊

Very well written and presented. I hope many viewers realize that all these people were the lions and founders of today’s modern computing world. Their collective work and products fundamentally changed humanity and the world.

One of my work colleagues worked at National in the Malaysia plant. He told me some interesting stories when he was working in the fab.

I joined National at the Arlington facility in the mid 90s, moving to Maine to start up their (then) new 200mm fab. Would love to know what your dad did, wondering if our paths ever crossed.

NS 16550 was a UART which was buggy - it would forget to issue a transmit complete interrupt so the software had to implement a backup which polled the chip. This was due to the architecture of how interrupts were generated.

My friend got his first job at National Semiconductor in 1992. The going pay for a fresh out of college Masters in EE was about $40K. He said Gil Amileo made a point to have lunch with every single employee.

I almost cried in the video. It was a nice performance! Congratulations!

It took me 4 hours to get from the Delta to San Jose, and every other car was roofless with a beautiful looking person in it. I wasn't there a week and at some awesome patio bar there was a fundraiser. My young smart ass bid $5 for a haircut. Everyone knew I was a newcomer and let me get it😊 took me 50 bucks in gas to find the place in Sunnyvale. God I miss hair I've got dozens of stories of San Jose even better but I ended up leaving with a hangover after 10 months.

Shout out to the creater of the creater, thanks Asianometry's dad!

Thank you Asianometry guys dad! :)

It was nice to credit your father for his work, good video!

that was a great retro look into the industry..!! Kudos to "Dad"

Hello, good historical job ! Although as a National Employee in Europe in the early 2000's before TI bought NS, I somewaht disagree on the statement on that period. We had a hell of time selling to the biggest customers, increasing prices and profits. Winning more new designs in numerous applications. But good job ! Thank you for this walk through the history of a company that made me "make business with fun". After leaving National, I had a very bad experience with another semiconductor company, simply because the human wasn't part of the equation. I then left to run my own small business...

I began working at National Semiconductor (“National”) in Santa Clara, immediately after receiving my Engineering degree, almost 40 years ago. IIRC, the company employed more than 24,000 people worldwide at the time.(My badge number was North of 57,000!) That was back when Silicon Valley actually made chips. My desk was in building 16 (amazingly, it still stands), just down the hall from Charlie’s cubicle. I worked side by side with Charlie’s youngest son. The Japanese semi makers overtook the US companies the next year. Charlie spent a lot of time complaining about the unfair capital and protectionist advantages the Japanese companies wielded. Most of those companies are gone now, too. It’s been one hell of a ride. BTW, I’ve always heard Sprague pronounced the American way: “Sprage.”

All your topics are always interesting. I wonder if a slant towards thin films for data storage technologies might someday fit into your topics.

I find these company histories fascinating. Trends and industry moving so quickly, that if you blink, you miss it and are out of business in a few years. And I'm always amazed at how most of these companies always have a maverick genious, and when they leave or die, the company rarely survives long.

Your dad had an amazing son. Bravo! . Wonderful telling of a great Silicon Valley story, thanks..

All these companies.... growing up in the bay area made them so familiar - having a friend who was becoming an electronics engineer meant learning a little about photoresists and the like, but the bay area had all sorts of creative new businesses of all kinds. Narional Semiconductor catalogs laying around....yup, great place to grow up if you were scientifically inclined.....

Ah the old row of blue databooks on the bookshelf...

Good video, but you got Bob Widlar's last name wrong. It should be pronounced wide-lar, not whid-lar. You should do a video on one of National's more successful competitors: Linear Technology (now Analog Devices). That's actually where Robert Dobkin ended up. Maxim Semiconductor/Integrated (also bought by Analog Devices) is another good one.

I just got a NS (I’m guessing mid-70’s) red LED watch.

Hey using sheep as a lawnmower wasn't a bad idea, management should've given Widlar some credit.

NSC Danbury, not a job but an adventure!