Victor 3900 Electronic Calculator Introduction Article
Electronics, October 18, 1965
Short article announcing the introduction of the first commercial application
of MOS integrated circuts in the
Victor 3900 electronic calculator.
The calculator was introduced
at the Business Equipment Manufacturers Association show in New York
during the week of October 25, 1965. The Victor 3900 was the first electronic
calculator to ever use "large scale" (in quotation marks because today's
Large Scale Integration (LSI) devices contain many millions of
transistors) Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (MOS) integrated circuits. While
the Victor 3900 was a history-making device, there were a lot of problems
with the IC technology, which was pushed literally beyond its limits.
As far as is known, approximately 1000 of the Victor 3900's were
were produced and sold, many of the machines suffered reliability
problems and were returned after numerous attempts at repair had failed.
The result was that the manufacturer of the ICs and the calculator (under
contract to Victor Comptometer), General Micro-electronics, ended up in
financial trouble, and was
sold to Philco-Ford (the electronics division
of Ford Motor Co.) in March of 1966. After Philco-Ford tried for
about a year and a half to sustain the contact with Victor Comptometer
it became clear that it was a losing battle. An end to the contract
with Victor was negotiated, along with an agreement that Philco-Ford
could produce whatever remaining calculators it had inventory to build, and
potentially sell them under the Philco-Ford name. As it turned out, a few
hundred machines were indeed built, with perhaps all of them ending up
deployed within Philco-Ford for desktop calculating use. Once the inventories
were depleted, the production of the calculator was
discontinued in
the spring of 1968.
Philco-Ford maintained the integrated circuit design and
manufacturing part of General Micro-electronics, but focused more on
developing standardized general-purpose ICs that were significantly
less complex than the ICs designed by GM-e for the Victor 3900.
The IC business, dubbed Philco-Ford Microelectronics, was split
into two parts; the manufacturing of bipolar and eventually MOS ICs,
stayed in Santa Clara, CA., and the MOS design group was
established in Blue Bell, PA. Because
the MOS design group ended up on the other end of the country, many of the
former GM-e MOS design gurus that hadn't aleady left GM-e
ended up leaving Philco-Ford in order to avoid
having to uproot their lives and move to the East Coast. A number of
those that left GM-e/Philco-Ford ended up grouping together, and with the aid of
venture capital and/or private investment, started up new
semiconductor-related companies in what is now known as the Silicon Valley.
