A news-brief in Electronics magazine dated June 24, 1968, indicating that Philco-Ford had recently shut down the production of the ground-breaking Victor 3900 MOS/LSI-based electronic calculator. The article also states that Philco-Ford in the process of negotiating with Victor Comptometer to end its contract for production of the calculator, as well as the integrated circuits it was based on because of manufacturing yield problems with the very complex (for the time) MOS Large Scale Integration chips designed specifically for the calculator.

The development of the integrated circuits used in the Victor 3900 as well as production of the calculator was initially contracted to a company called General Micro-Electronics (GM-e), which was one of the early IC designers/fabricators of complex Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (MOS) integrated circuits. MOS ICs utilized transistors that were smaller, less complex to fabricate, and consumed less power than the comparable bipolar transistors. These characteristics would allow many more logic devices to be placed on a chip than with bipolar technology.

GM-e initially had a great deal of trouble creating the 23 unique chips that made up the calculator, but as time went on, the yields increased and GM-e was able to make enough good chips to begin delivering calculators to Victor Comptometer for sale to customers. There was a problem, though; GM-e had spent a tremendous amount of money get to the point of producing enough working chips, and that, combined with some financial management issues, the company fell upon hard times, and was sold to Philco-Ford in March of 1966. When GM-e was purchased, many of the folks that made up its MOS IC brain trust left to pursue other opportunities. Though Philco-Ford made a valiant effort to continue production of the ICs and the calculators for Victor Comptometer, in time, the yields for the ICs fell off dramatically, and it became financially impractical to produce enough working chips to continue production of the calculator. This is what prompted Philco-Ford to halt the production of the chips and negotiate the termination of the contract with Victor Comptometer as outlined in the article.

To learn more about the story of the Victor 3900, see the Old Calculator Museum essay on this amazing technological benchmark.