updated 23 jan 2020
new 2004
"Solid state" has become a quaint phrase, like calling music "digital" or referring to "horseless" carriages. We no longer have to refer to computers as electronic, digital, stored-program, automatic, computers. They're now just things that cost money, get stolen, break down, and are security risks to your person when they're working right. Progress!
Here are (at least some of) my solid state component catalogs and datasheets, as I have done for most of my electron tube data. It's a little harder to index in that the "catalogs" are often folded sheets with one or few devices per page; additionally, there isn't a consistent numbering scheme across all manufacturers, and manufacturers themselves changed the names of processes and logic families, especially in the first few years of commercial ICs.
Therefore, unlike the tube data, I'm at least initially ordering the data by manufacturer. Hopefully, if you're trying to I.D. an old chip, you recognize the logo, if the name isn't clear. I guess I should do a page on reading IC packaging (logos, date codes, etc) but that's another project.
I started with Fairchild since they were the first out with commercial integrated circuits. The oldest data I have so far is 1964, the newest 1969, and I'm not likely to go much newer than that.
The index of devices by part number follows these paragraphs, below.
Here are the catalogs in image form if you just want to browse.
Typical of the early years, Fairchild has many confusing microcircuit family names, all determined by the processes used to fabricate them, with a little (very little) marketing savvy thrown in. Keep in mind this was somewhat like the dot-com boom of the 1990's; a lot of products either didn't ship, or didn't work as well as claimed; but unlike the dot commies the semi manufacturers had a big, fat sugar daddy -- the military -- who paid exorbitant prices to get nearly all of early production for themselves (I think, but am not certain, that early microcircuitry was available to the U.S. military in the late 1950's). So much for simple entrepreneurship.
But this was also early Moore's Law, technologies were changing probably monthly, so new logic familes (eg. better manufacturing processes and design) were often genuinely better. What follows is a very amateur, cursory.
I believe Fairchild's first commercial logic family was their Planar Epitaxial Micrologic Industrial Microcircuits. I don't know what was available, but this 1964 preliminary Planar Epitaxial Micrologic datasheet lists nine devices, the most complex a single flip flop. Note the pencilled-in price ($36 in 1964 dollars) for one flip flop in a metal can. I've never seen any of these weirdly-numbered parts. It's probably RTL-like internally, but I don't have any data in the innards.
(A note on Fairchild part numbering: Fairchild often, but not consistently, put a family indicator in front of the basic part number, eg. uL930. Many of the later 4-digit numbers are "compatible" devices in an improved family (eg. a 962 is a DTL triple 3-in NAND; 9962 is CCSL triple 3-in NAND) but you have to be careful with fan-in/fan-out, Vcc and other issues.)
The logic families here include: RTL (resistor-transistor logic); DTL (diode-transistor logic); HLL DTL (high-level logic (HV) DTL); CCSL compatible current-sinking logic (TTL precursor); TTL (good old transistor-transistor logic); TTuL (very early planar epi logic internally described as "transistor-transistor" but it ain't "TTL").
Device names are not standardized, vary with manufacturer, etc, so here they're sorted in numerical then alphabetical order.