Intel 4004, world's first commercial microprocessor, celebrates 40th birthday

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

Wow... 40 years. I remember building a project with my father that used the 4004 in the early 70's - an eprom burner. We designed the hardware from scratch as well as the software, which was written in assembler. I was maybe 10 years old. Ah, the memories

http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/15/i...or-celebrates/

Pull out the candles and champagne, because the Intel 4004 is celebrating a major birthday today -- the big four-oh. That's right, it's been exactly four decades since Intel unveiled the world's first commercially available CPU, with an Electronic News ad that ran on November 15th, 1971.

It all began in 1969, when Japan's Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation asked Intel to create 12 chips for its Busicom 141-PF calculator. With that assignment, engineers Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff and Stanley Mazor set about designing what would prove to be a groundbreaking innovation -- a 4-bit, 16-pin microprocessor with a full 2,300 MOS transistors, and about 740kHZ of horsepower.

The 4004's ten micron feature size may seem gargantuan by contemporary standards, but at the time, it was rather remarkable -- especially considering that the processor was constructed from a single piece of silicon. In fact, Faggin was so proud of his creation that he decided to initial its design with "FF," in appropriate recognition of a true work of art. Hit up the coverage links below for more background on the Intel 4004, including a graphic history of the microprocessor, from the Inquirer.

[gary]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the heads-up and great to hear of your early reminiscences of the 4004.

I still have a copy of a 4004 databook and have scanned a couple of pages which
appear below.

Only about three weeks ago I was studying the 4004 schematics which Intel
made available on their "museum exhibits" web site.
See http://www.intel.com/about/companyin...4004/index.htm

Schematics here -
http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/Gene..._schematic.pdf

As we were discussing at Lostock, it is funny how what will later be recognized as a
seminal technological development is not necessarily perceived as such by
everyone at the time. You and I both exchanged stories of our first encounter
with the IBM PC which compared to the more powerful and larger computers we had been
using at the time fell far short of being a useful machine to put to work.

The 4004 was similar in that regard and despite the brilliance of the Tedd Hoff et. al.
design it was not even perceived by everyone at Intel to be a potential winner. After all,
it was designed for the Busicom calculator. The world minicomputer market in
1971 was around 20,000 machines and even if the 4004 could make its way into
10% of those, it was a very limited market. But once engineer's recognized
it could be put in petrol pumps, supermarket scales, thermostats and so on,
everything changed and the introduction of the 8008 in '72 and later the 8080 helped
transform Intel into the giant it is today.

Intel had an interesting corporate culture. If you ever visited any of those Silicon
Valley semiconductor company offices, you will be familiar with what I use to refer
to as the "sea of partitions". The Intel founders, Noyce, Moore and Grove,
created a corporate culture where at the time they didn't have their own executive
offices, but just sat in the same big room behind the same low particle board
partitions that everyone else had and worked for years off old second hand,
scratched metal tables. There were no assigned executive parking spaces and
no executive lunches.