News Archive - Arthur Lowell's New Job after General Micro-electronics
New Role - Arthur Lowell, formerly President of General Micro-electronics, assumes role of Asst. President & Exec. Director of R&D at Autonetics
Electronics, May, 3, 1965
This article talks about Colonel Arthur Lowell's new role as Assistant to the
President, and Acting Executive Director of Research and Development at the
Autonetics division of North American Aviation(NAA). Autonetics was the
electronics section of NAA, famous for developing electronics for the
space, military and government security environments, as well as a relatively
short stint making some commercial computers in a line called RECOMP
(RECOMP II, and III), with the RECOMP II generally recognized as the first
commecially-product fully transistorized computer. The RECOMP II and III
computers were compact scientific and engineering
computers, and were considered "portable" computers, weighing 200 pounds or
less for the CPU. Col. Lowell's previous job was as the President and
one of the founders (and finder of start-up funding) of General
Micro-electronics (GM-e), a company founded by Lowell and three defectors
from Fairchild Camera and Instrument. GM-e was originally founded to
improve RTL (Resistor-Transistor Logic) integrated circuits, which were
primarily used by the military and security sectors for weapons and
communications systems, but RTL's future was limited, and another focus was
Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (MOS) integrated circuits, which, at the time, we
rather a touchy technology that was not yet perfected. GM-e's claim to fame
came in the development of an extremely advanced set of MOS integrated circuits
that powered an electronic calculator build under contract for Victor
Comptometer called the
Victor 3900.
After General Micro-electronics suffered cash problems related to it's
mis-choice of investing in RTL IC's, as well as major cash drain relating
to the development of the MOS IC's for the Victor calculator, Pyle National,
the major source of capital that Col. Lowell had arranged for GM-e, asked
Lowell to step down, and not that long thereafter, he assumed the role at
Autonetics. It is interesting to note that Autonetics was the division of
(by that time) North American Rockwell that Sharp Electronics contracted with
to develop the 4-chip MOS Large-Scale Integration chip set use to make the
history-making Sharp QT-8D
calculator possible.
For more information in the story of GM-e, and the development of the
Victor 3900, see the Old Calculator Museum's
essay on the topic.
