Vector Graphic Advert - July 1977

This is an early advert for Vector Graphic, the company formed in 1976 by two housewives - Lore Harp and Carole Ely. The husband of the former, Bob Harp, had been selling similar 8K boards from his garage.

In modern terms, and in common with other memory boards of the time, these were fantastically expensive - 8K for $275, or about £1,590 in 2024 money equates to around £160,000 per megabyte or about £164 million per gigabyte. Even a mobile phone comes with a few GB as standard.

Note also how just 8K in memory required a total of 72 chips and 5 other components - with linear scaling, a 1GB board would require nearly 10 million chips occupying around 6,300m² - assuming that 8K fits on a board 30cm x 15cm.

The source of Vector's memory chips was Fairchild Semiconductor, a company formed by the famous "traitorous eight" - a group of semiconductor engineers who had been working with transistor inventor William Shockley but left, citing "management-style issues", to form their own company with the financial backing of Fairchild Camera and Instrument.

Fairchild in turn spawned many major Silicon Valley companies (referred to as Fairchildren in a 1978 BBC documentary^[1]), in particular Intel and AMD, as one by one, the traitorous eight left to start their own new businesses.