I was writing an article on reverse-engineering vintage synthesisers[0], and I ended up getting majorly sidetracked trying to find out exactly what year the Hitachi HD44780 LCD controller was first manufactured, or try and find any background information on it. The earliest reference to it I can find online is a 'preliminary' user's manual[1], dated March 1981. I know it's a bit of a weird rabbit hole to go down, but I figured I'd get to the bottom of this mystery. It's a shame that there's so little background information available about one of the best-known ICs in history.
0: https://ajxs.me/blog/Introduction_to_Reverse-Engineering_Vin...
1: https://archive.org/details/Hitachi-DotMarixLiquidCrystalDis...