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It's the other way around. The series started by 1 manufacturer with the prefix SN54/SN64/SN74 for military/industrial/commercial grade ships. Other manufact
by hyperman1 2y ago
It's the other way around.
The series started by 1 manufacturer with the prefix SN54/SN64/SN74 for military/industrial/commercial grade ships. Other manufacturers made compatible clones with other starting characters than SN, and 74 proved much more popular than 54 and 64. So the whole ecosystem became known as the 74 chips.
Technological advances made the 74 series obsolete qua speed and power usage, so center characters like HC/HCT made improved variants with functional or full backward compatibility.
I'm not sure but assume the 4000 series to be an equivalent but incompatible family that 'lost', much like vhs vs betamax.
- dreamcompiler 2y ago7400 series was from Texas Instruments and was originally all TTL (i.e. bipolar transistors). 4000 series came from RCA later and was originally all CMOS. 4000 was popular with designers because it used much lower power, had wider voltage range, and had higher fanout. But in the early days it was also slow, so not many famous computers were built with 4000 series. Later CMOS technology got fast and a funny thing happened: TI and other companies started building CMOS equivalents of 7400 series chips (with the letters HC in the middle for "High speed CMOS") and everybody adopted that system because they were drop-in replacements for the TTL parts but used much less power.