Gotta thanks the folks at Anandtech’s Highly Technical forum for this find. Unless your electrically-talented or an electrical engineer, you probably won’t find this all that funny, but I got a good laugh out of it.
[tag:electronics][tag:joke][tag:prank]
Supposedly, back in the mid 70′s, a bunch of engineers working for Signetics thought it would be funny to include the specs for their new state-of-the-art “Write Only” memory chip in their company’s product catalog. Wikipedia has a good writeup of the gag under Write Only Memory, but basically they were fedup with the huge pile of approval & review paperwork that was required for publication.  The people reviewing the catalog prior to production, however, weren’t engineers and didn’t get the joke, so it went straight through to production. The company isn’t around anymore (Bought by Philips), but the joke lives on. Everyone knows that electrical engineer’s are packrats, so I’m sure there are alot of folks with this catalog laying around.

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Some funny things to look for:

  • The “non-hermetic sealing technique” which prevents harmful ions, but allows friendly ions
  • Post-mortem memories for Weapon Systems
  • Cooling requirements of a 6-foot fan 1/2 inch from the chip.
  • The “Pins Remaining” vs “Number of Socket Insertions” graph
  • Slip-on Latex Protectors

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