Time passes rapidly.
The first computer I was fortunate to own was a Motorola D2 Kit in 1976.
It was an evaluation board that Motorola had introduced for its
6800 microprocessor
and came with 128 bytes of static RAM (yes, that's bytes) and 1KB of EPROM.
The CPU could run at 1MHz but from memory was clocked at 512KHz.
Delivered, it came in a large binder which included documentation such as
schematics and assembler manuals as well as two bare circuit boards and
all the components. You soldered it yourself.
See
http://www.computermuseumgroningen.n...la/6800map.jpg
The completed system looked like this -
http://www.computermuseumgroningen.n...a/6800d2sm.jpg
There was an executive that ran in EPROM that enabled you to punch
the hexidecimal opcodes into memory and then execute them. Seven
segment LCD's provided one form of output.
Programming in hex left me with the unfortunate legacy that I can still
remember many of those opcodes in my head to this day.
86 was a Load A Register (LDA). 20 was a Branch Always (BRA).
7E was Jump (JMP) and so on. It is a total waste of brain cells.
The system could be interfaced to a commodity cassette recorder and programs
stored and retrieved using what was called the Kansas City Standard.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Barrykgerdes
I think the NSC SCMP (National Semi Conductors Micro Processor) was the first reasonably successful micro processor chip released circa 1975. There were a number of published circuits in electronics magazines around 1976-77 that used it. However Motorola was not far behind and then came the very successful Z80.
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Hi Barry,
The Intel 4004 was the first microprocessor, introduced in Nov 1971.
It was a 4-bit device and though sales were initially slow as engineers pondered
what to do with it, they did pick up and it was arguably a success. It certainly
spawned an incredible revolution.
I still have a copy of the databook and have attached a scan from one of the
pages from it below.
The Intel 8008 was an 8 bit device introduced in 1972 and it was the first device
to be incorporated into a true microcomputer.
The Intel 8080, Motorola 6800 and NatSemi SC/MP ("Scamp") were all
introduced in 1974. Arguably the Motorola and Intel devices were the biggest
commercial winners and these two specific devices spawned successive
generations over the following decades that kept the two companies as the
dominant players in a highly competitive market.
The Zilog Z80 didn't appear on the scene until 1976.
The 6800 had the advantage of a cleaner architecture. For example, it
didn't have the ugliness of the 8080's I/O instructions. Instead, all I/O was
memory mapped.
However, when IBM Engineers at Boca Raton in Florida chose the Intel 8088, one of
the successors to the 8080, for inclusion in the first PC, few would have guessed that
it would ensure that the 8080's DNA would get passed down to the present time in
the commodity PC's that we use today.
However, the race was not always that clear and for some time when PC's were
still of limited use in business, Motorola MPU's dominated in the professional
market and were incorporated in the first workstations out of
Sun Microsystems, Apollo Computer and Hewlett Packard.
For sheer number of microprocessor core licenses sold in the world, the clear winner
is ARM Holdings out of Cambridge in the UK. As at January 2011, some 15 billion
ARM CPU cores have shipped and it is predicted 5 billion will ship this year alone.
Used in nearly every mobile phone in the world, ARM processors also account for
an estimated 90% of all embedded 32 bit processors in the world.
One of the more mind boggling manufacturing statistics I have ever read
was in the Dec 2007 issue of IEEE Spectrum magazine, which quoted an
estimate attributed to Gordon Moore, founder of Intel, that perhaps one
quintillion - that's 10 to the power of 18 - transistors are fabricated within
devices annually. Moore goes onto say, "We make more transistors per year
than the number of printed characters in all the newspapers, magazines, books,
photocopies, and computer printouts".
