The ware for October 2020 is shown below.

I was desoldering this from a board, and surprisingly, the case just melted off revealing this. I thought it was pretty neat to see what was inside!

The ware for September 2020 is a board from a CM-1. Thanks again to David Gingold for the great photo, and congrats to Brian for precisely naming it. Email me for your prize! (Roland, you were so close!)

The Ware for September 2020 is shown below.

This is a beautifully photographed ware by David Gingold. When I saw it, I couldn’t let the image go — just had to make it a Name that Ware. Once the solution has been guessed, I’ll add another broader contextual image.

The ware’s been named, so here’s the broader contextual image; I’ll handle the formalities at the end of this month!

Well, we didn’t get an ID on the chip, but I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed flipping through the NASA reports that dzjc linked. I feel like these are unique windows into that short period of time when we didn’t have enough computer power to design, analyze, or even document computers, but we still tried to make computers nonetheless. I appreciate the intangible thoughtfulness that is often found in reports where every diagram is hand-drawn and every page rendered via typewriter. Thanks for the links, dzjc! email me to claim your prize.

The Ware for August 2020 is shown below.

While sending me an unrelated photo that I will feature in a future Name that Ware, David Willmore nerd-sniped me with this incidental photo. It is as of yet unidentified, but as far as I could tell it’s from a short-lived family of 1969-era Texas Instruments “DRA” — a Discretionary Route Array. Basically a wafer-scale bipolar gate array (back when “wafer-scale” meant one 1.5″ wafer — hence the circular boss in the middle of the package), which could run at speeds of up to 10MHz. For example, the DRA-2003 was a dual 501-bit shift register, and cost $390 back then in 100-249 unit quantities (around $2,800 inflation-adjusted). As an interesting side note, the rule-of-thumb pricing for a single processed 12″ wafer today is … about $3,000. That’s Moore’s Law for you: 50 years got us roughly a billion times more transistors on a single wafer of 64x the area for about the same cost.

I couldn’t find anything on this specific part number (DRA-2009E), so I figured why not turn it over to Name that Ware to see if anyone could come up with more details, about the logic family itself, or ideally about the specific part number shown here.