Thanks all.
I thought I would share a few things my father related to me during his time while working with the EEC-IV.
The push for the development of the EEC was, naturally, government mandate for reducing emissions.
Dad said early on the EEC-IV equipped vehicles that were tested in Smoggy Los Angeles were actually emitting cleaner air out the tailpipe than the air they were ingesting (ignoring CO2, of course). So the cars were actually cleaning the air of nitrous compounds.
The EEC was a collaboration between Ford Electronics, Bosch, and Intel.
Bosch had worked out the solenoid injectors and Lamda (O2) sensor, etc.. however they lacked a good computer control. In fact, early Bosch systems had analog based control.
Ford teamed up with Intel and had a special CPU (the 8061) developed specially for the EEC-IV. By this time Ford had good experience with microcontrollers. My father interfaced very often with the Intel engineers. I can remember taking tours of the Landsdale plant and my father showing me the microprocessor die under a microscope.
My father was a capable electrical engineer but at this point of his life he was manufacturing engineer. So his focus was building a durable and reliable product within cost restraints. However reliability issues would crop up with test vehicles early on that required his design input.
It was noticed that test vehicles driven near radio stations would just cut out and die. This was caused by the EMI upsetting the CPU and external logic circuits. The solution was to install additional bypass capacitors around all logic devices within the EEC-IV.
There was a lot of testing performed. There were EEC-IV equipped vehicles tested in Death Valley and high up in the Rocky mountains and in Alaska.
Production EEC-IVs would get put through a lengthy burn in procedure and environmental tests before going out the door.
I find it amazing that the 36 year old EEC-IV in my Scorpio is still chugging away.
During this time my father was an avid computer hobbyist. He got myself and my brothers heavily involved in home built computers of that time period. These were CP/M based Z80 machines. There was a kit called the "Big Board" which we built a few, and then later there were surplus Xerox 820 boards that became available. There was an early computer hobby Journal called The Micro Cornucopia which we all subscribed to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Cornucopia. I can remember my dad and I hacking the BIOS of the Big Board so it would skip the memory test so it would boot up faster and submitting the mod to the journal.
...and so began my long career as an embedded software engineer.
