1985 HD44780 Controller Data Book - crystalfontz.com

A Look Back in Tech History: The HD44780 Controller Data Sheet

Sherman, set the wayback machine to 1985: We are going to take a look at the original HD44780 Data Sheet.

1985 HD44780 Controller Data Book - crystalfontz.com

Some time back, we wrote about the legendary HD44780 controller, to which the modern character LCD industry owes much of its existence.

Having been in the business of designing embedded electronics for some time, we love all the old electronic stuff (ask us about our collection of 1980’s Atari vector arcade games in the break room!). So when we came across an “Advance Copy” of the Hitachi LCD Driver Data Book dated 1985 on eBay, we snapped it up.

To give you an idea or how long ago this was, this is a physical, paper, databook, not some ephemeral stream of coded electron states delivered from nebulous cloud. As far as we can tell, there is not ANY version information about the HD44780 chip in the databook. Our best guess is that there was only the one design, so there were not any versions to track.

The problem with physical paper books is that we can’t share that book with everyone. But we can share a high-resolution scan of the section of the data book that includes the HD44780 (delivered to you as an ephemeral stream of coded electron states) a PDF of the Advance Copy Datasheet for the HD44780!
→ View or download the 1985 and current HD44780 data sheets (PDF) here

So enjoy a little time travel back to 1985 when even a big company still used mono-spaced fonts printed on real paper to give you advance information on their brand new HD44780 LCD controller.

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