Six open-drain inverters in a DIP-14 — what that means on the bench
The CD74AC05E: The 74AC series is a high-speed CMOS family with propagation delay rated at 8.2 ns into 50 pF at 5 V. Quiescent current sits at 4 µA max, which keeps the power budget low in battery-backed or always-on sections.
Open-drain output — the feature that changes the wiring
Open-drain logic means the output transistor connects to ground when active and disconnects (high-impedance) when inactive. There is no internal pull-up to VCC.