Open the 1964 Ledger a Shipping Product Not a Patent or a Prototype
# Open the 1964 Ledger: a Shipping Product, Not a Patent or a Prototype
## 1. What This Series Covers, and What It Deliberately Does Not
This series tells the commercial history of the first MOS integrated circuits actually sold as products, and, in its second half, the first linear integrated circuits that made analog signal processing a catalog part rather than a discrete-component chore. It opens in 1964 with General Microelectronics Inc. and Electronic Arrays, the two companies that shipped the first commercial PMOS shift-register and calculator chips, and it closes a decade later inside Fairchild's analog group, where Bob Widlar's amplifier designs turned into the industry's longest-lived catalog parts.
Three adjacent stories already live in this directory, and this series is deliberately none of them. The 1963 Fairchild patent filing and Wanlass-Sah paper are intellectual-property and publication history, covered in `cmos_invention_1963`, with no shipping product behind them for roughly fifteen years. The lab-bench devices built at Bell Labs, RCA, and Fairchild through the early 1960s are experimental, pre-commercial hardware, covered in `experimental_mos_bipolar_logic`. This series starts where both of those leave off: a company takes an order, cuts a die, and ships a part with a part number and a price.
## 2. The Shape of the Two-Part Arc
Steps 1 through 10 cover Part A: the first commercial MOS integrated circuits, their companies, their customers, their yield problems, and the moment the same density advantage that sold calculator chips began pointing toward a shipping memory chip instead. Steps 11 through 20 cover Part B: linear integrated circuits, a genuinely different product category built mostly in bipolar, not MOS, but built in the same era, often inside the same companies, and riding the same industry growth curve. The seam between the two halves, around steps 10 and 11, names that relationship explicitly rather than leaving the reader to infer it.