pwillard:
Motorola's MECL family dates back to early 1970's. (Circa 1972)Parts like: MC10101 Quad Gate or MC1227F
Typical Speeds 85-120MHZ / 4ns switching time... not bad for 1972.
I have heard about ECL and how it was used on the first supercomputers. From Wikipedia, concerning the Cray I:
The new machine was the first Cray design to use integrated circuits (ICs). Although ICs had been available since the 1960s, it was only in the early 1970s that they reached the performance necessary for high-speed applications. The Cray-1 used only four different IC types, an ECL dual 5-4 NOR gate (one 5-input, and one 4-input, each with differential output), another slower MECL 10K 5-4 NOR gate used for address fanout, a 16×4-bit high speed (6 ns) static RAM (SRAM) used for registers, and a 1,024×1-bit 50 ns SRAM used for the main memory. These integrated circuits were supplied by Fairchild Semiconductor and Motorola. In all, the Cray-1 contained about 200,000 gates.
What I still don't get is the crappy level of integration. I guess this implies that there used to be a 16x4 ECL RAM unless there was a way to achieve 6ns with TTL back then. Why no ECL counters, shift registers, or an ALU for example? Can you imagine designing a processing unit out of dual 5-4 NOR gates?