Motorola HEP semiconductors.

[Cydrome Leader]

Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> wrote:

On Mon, 8 Dec 2014, Mark Zenier wrote:

In article <alpine.LNX.2.02.1412071927140.6750@darkstar.example.org>,
Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> wrote:
On Sun, 7 Dec 2014, Ian Field wrote:



"Michael A. Terrell" <mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:4PKdnTPg6vwFkhnJnZ2dnUU7-QWdnZ2d@earthlink.com...

kilowatt wrote:

The HEP refers to the RCA line of replacement semiconductors, called Hobby
Electronic Product HEP

Large catalog of subs and generics. I have a copy in my Libr. If your list
is not too long I could look up a few pt no.s



No, HEP was Motorola. RCA was SK.


That reminds me - an SK reference would also come in handy, those parts turn
up fairly often in the Indian magazine; Electronics For You.

I don't think I ever saw an SK guide. They existed, but I just never saw
one. They were never used that much, at the moment I'm finding it hard to
think of where I'd have seen them. THe HEP did get referenced in
magazines.

They were like the ECG and NTE "phonebooks", but I only saw them at the
electronics stores. They probably didn't make as big a deal about
selling them as ECG/NTE did.

Probably. I got my HEP guides for free, circling one of those cards
in the hobby magazines. I paid for my ECG or NET guide, they were on
display at one of the local parts stores. Not a whole lot, but I suppose
if they put a price on it, people will take more care of it. But I didnt'
see an ECG or NET guide until later, probably the eighties. I'm not sure
when they started, but maybe that too was because the HEP line was very
much aimed at hobbyists.

I've even got a NTE floppy disk with the cross reference database lookup
on it, for MS-DOS. Looked at the data to see if the data could be
extracted so I could run a reverse sort, but it was encrypted/compressed
in some non-trivial way.

I remember that, I may even have the floppy. It was long enough ago that
it was "cutting edge", now it's quaint, why have a local copy when it's on
the internet.

I'm pretty sure I never bought an HEP device. But I got the HEP guide
about 1974, and I found it fairly useful, look up a device to get the
general specs, then go through my drawer of scrap transistors to find one
that crossed. At least it gave me a general idea of whether something wsa
a UHF device or not. But later when I got an ECG or NTE guide, I realized
the HEP transistors substitutes had to be fairly vague, since HEP had
relatively few devices.

I have a lot of RCA databooks, I knew someone who worked at RCA in the
seventies, but I don't think any of the databooks mention SK.

Wasn't it part of the TV manufacturing, not the Semiconductor division?
I vaguely remember that the SK stuff was under Thomson for a while.

Maybe. But I remember SK was around earlier. It may have simply been
intended for the repair business, not marketted to hobbyists like the HEP
line. That would make a big difference, even to the guides being in

the SK series was for repairs. They printed fat one-way cross reference
books. Sometimes the "equivalent" was fine, sometimes it wasn't even
close. You never really knew what the part they sold you really was. There
was quite a bit of electrically equivalent but different physical case
issues too. You were warned about that though. There's got to be like a
half dozen plastic cases that sort of replace to3 cans for example.

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

Cydrome Leader wrote:

the SK series was for repairs. They printed fat one-way cross reference
books. Sometimes the "equivalent" was fine, sometimes it wasn't even
close. You never really knew what the part they sold you really was. There
was quite a bit of electrically equivalent but different physical case
issues too. You were warned about that though. There's got to be like a
half dozen plastic cases that sort of replace to3 cans for example.

Part of that problem was more than one manufacturer used the same
part number for different devices.


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