Before all publications went through the marketing department first...

[KrisBlueNZ]

I saw this data sheet recently for a transistor from Matsushita and had to laugh at the word marked in the blue ellipse. This was obviously published before the days when every single company publication had to go via the marketing department to make sure it was word-optimised to put the very best possible spin on the product being announced!



You wouldn't see anything like that nowadays. Suitable replacement words would be excellent, best-in-class, wonderful, majestic, orgasmic, outstanding, ultimate, fantabulous, amazing, etc.

 

[Harald Kapp]

Here is another good example (PDF attachment, extract from this website) of a fantastic datasheet

I may have posted this earlier. Anyway, it never fails to make me laugh.

 

[Gryd3]

So, I wonder what happened with this one..

 

[KrisBlueNZ]

LOL!

That's a bit ironic anyway... Perhaps in the 1970s National Semiconductor was an important company, but since I started in electronic design, I've always associted them with mediocrity.

Before they were bought out by Texas Instruments (one of the companies they pooh-pooh in that advertisement), they were regularly being trumped in all of their markets. Linear Technology make better regulators. Burr-Brown (now part of TI as well) made better op-amps. Maxim made better data converters. Fairchild, ON Semi (Motorola) and NXP might have beaten them in the discrete semiconductor market, but I couldn't say, because they didn't even compete there!

The closest they ever came to creating ubiquitous components was the LM324 and the LM358, which are second-sourced by everyone from Europe to China and were never much good anyway!

I only ever designed in one National Semiconductor part - the LM607 low-offset op-amp. But within a year a better and cheaper replacement had come along.

I guess that ad is an example of pure marketing wank, unconstrained by strong connections to reality!

 

[KJ6EAD]

I saw this data sheet recently for a transistor from Matsushita and had to laugh at the word marked in the blue ellipse.

They mispelled "planar" too.