There’s a certain minimum set of stuff the typical Hackaday reader is likely to have within arm’s reach any time he or she is in the shop. Soldering station? Probably. Oscilloscope? Maybe. Multimeter? Quite likely. But there’s one thing so basic, something without which countless numbers of projects would be much more difficult to complete, that a shop without one or a dozen copies is almost unthinkable. It’s the humble 555 timer chip, a tiny chunk of black plastic with eight leads that in concert with just a few extra components can do everything from flashing an LED a couple of times a second to creating music and sound effects.

We’ve taken a look under the hood of the 555 before and featured many, many projects that show off the venerable chip’s multiple personalities quite well. But we haven’t looked at how Everyone’s First Chip came into being, and what inspired its design. Here’s the story of the 555 and how it got that way.

Perfect Timing

For Swiss-born engineer Hans Camenzind, the 1960s were a mixed bag. He came to the United States at the beginning of the decade and earned his Master’s from Northeastern University. In those days, the ring of communities around Boston was becoming a mecca for technology, and Hans wanted in on the action. But with a wife at home and kids on the way, one does what one must, and he landed a job with the P.R. Mallory Corporation, a Massachusetts company primarily in the dry cell business.

Mallory wasn’t exactly a cutting-edge tech firm, but Hans stuck with it for six years, hoping that the staid company would break into something more exciting than batteries. It didn’t, and Hans started bombarding tech companies from coast to coast with resumes. In 1968, he signed on with Signetics, a young Silicon Valley company started by former Fairchild engineers who bristled at their company’s focus on discrete components and believed that integrated circuits were going to be the wave of the future. Finally, here was something that Hans could sink his teeth into.

Sadly, it was not to last. Signetics had struggled right from the start, trying to build its business around custom ICs built to customer specifications. The company eventually found success in the defense market, but by the time Hans joined up, competition from other, larger manufacturers, ironically including Fairchild, had put the company on the ropes financially. That coupled with the downturn in the US economy as the 1970s rolled around led to round after round of layoffs at Signetics. Within two years, Hans saw half of his Signetics colleagues disappear.

Knowing how the story would end, Hans took a leap of faith. He resigned from Signetics, but not before convincing his management to hire him right back as a consultant. The company desperately needed a win, so they gave him a one-year contract to come up with something new. Hans was working at a fraction of his …read more

Source:: Hackaday