Plus Post: Rockwell AIM 65

From the January 1980 issue of Electronics Australia magazine

The Company

Rockwell International has been around for quite a while. Willard Rockwell started the company in 1919 to sell a newly designed truck axle bearing. Over the years, Rockwell acquired businesses in many different fields, including defense, industrial electronics, automotive components, and more. They built both the Apollo spacecraft and the Space Shuttle program. In 1967, they merged with North American Aviation. Before the merger, North American Aviation had developed a MOSFET-based calculator for its many engineers. After the merger, Rockwell started manufacturing the calculators themselves. This led to the creation of Rockwell Semiconductor.

In the 1970s, Rockwell introduced their Parallel Processing System line of microprocessors. The PPS-4 microprocessor was introduced in 1972 and was the “world’s third commercially successful microprocessor”. These chips were used in a wide range of products including “cash registers, fax machines, home appliances, pinball machines, toys, and calculators”.

Eventually, the PPS chips were eclipsed by the MOS 6502 series. Rockwell spun off the semiconductor division as Conexant Systems in 1999. The company was then purchased several more times and was finally acquired by Synaptics, Inc. in July 2017.