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- Path: sparky!uunet!news.mentorg.com!sdl!garyg!garyg
- From: garyg@Warren.MENTORG.COM (Gary Gendel)
- Newsgroups: sci.electronics
- Subject: Re: DOES AMERICA SAY YES TO JAPAN? - Off t
- Date: 17 Dec 1992 19:13:10 GMT
- Organization: Mentor Graphics, IC Group
- Lines: 33
- Distribution: world
- Message-ID: <1gqjg6INN9sq@sdl.Warren.MENTORG.COM>
- References: <BzExLy.7IH@news.cso.uiuc.edu>
- Reply-To: garyg@Warren.MENTORG.COM
- NNTP-Posting-Host: garyg.warren.mentorg.com
-
- In article 7IH@news.cso.uiuc.edu, irvine@uxh.cso.uiuc.edu (Brent Irvine) writes:
- >> Americans probably buy most Japanese products because there no longer
- >>is any choice. TV? VCR? CD? STEREO? Are there any of these made in the
- >>US?
- >> No.
- >
- >RCA TVs 19" and larger are designed and made in the US.
-
- Ah! The RCA saga. Here's where American business knowhow really shines. RCA
- suffered some really hard times in the 70's ending with the Capacitive Disk Video
- efforts. At that time CEO Bradshaw decided to get RCA back to its electronics roots.
- Part of this meant buying a CMOS process from Japan. Note that RCA pioneered CMOS
- and SOS and is sometimes called the father of CMOS. As the 80's progressed, the
- semiconductor industry, especially ASICS, were in a downhill slide. The RCA
- Semicustom Division bucked this trend by developing Design Automation tools years
- ahead of the industry. In '85 GE took over RCA in order to get NBC. GE hacked RCA
- into pieces and sold it off to any one who was interested. RCA consumer products
- went to SGS Thompson of France, etc... The RCA Design Automation group scattered
- with the close of the Semiconductor Division by Harris. GE kept NBC and the
- Aerospace/Military divisions. They have recently sold off everything but NBC,
- which they are looking for a buyer. The bottom line is that a growing multi-billion
- world-competitive organization was snuffed out, not by the Japanese, but pure
- American greed. Talk to any employee of RCA at the time, I believe the majority
- would be still happy to be working at RCA. I certainly would be.
-
- Yes, France's SGS Thompson (RCA) manufactures TVs in the US... very good ones from
- the tradition of excellence spawned from the RCA heritage.
-
- Gary Gendel
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