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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (100968)	3/17/2000 12:05:00 AM
From: Gary Ng	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Jim, relax <G> I never claimed that I am good at that or anything at all but do observed that you may be much better in areas other that technical. >Hummm...I guess I mis-typed. So Gar...which chip was the >first 16 bit Intel chip? I believe most would say 8086 or 8088. >Since you were around back then perhaps you can tell us >the name of the Japanese calculator company that Intel >developed the 4004 for and how much Intel had to spend to >buy the patents back... I am not that old. The first 'computer' I played with was an Atari 400 in high school. >Or maybe the year the 80286 was introduced if you are >younger than I think. You can get that from Byte magazine(or are they still around). >Or just for kicks tell us what "PC" the 8080 was inside... That I really don't know. I remembered Z80 was the king in this area other than those 6502 in Apple. BTW, is Zilog still around ? Gary

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (100968)	3/17/2000 12:25:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Jim - back in the late '60s, lots of people in the industry were looking for ways to combine logic into more dense packages but for the most part the thinking was on integrating existing components, much as the early ICs had integrated discrete gate logic. Ted Hoff had joined Intel from Stanford in 1968 or '69 and was working on a number of projects to combine functions on larger ICs. One of the projects was for the Japanese calculator company Busicom. Hoff came up with the then-radical idea that instead of just combining existing logic on larger chips - given that the technology was a long ways from being able to produce a "calculator on a chip" or even on a dozen chips - that instead they could use a general-purpose programmable CPU to implement a calculator. The general architecture was a straight Von Neuman approach with a 4-bit word and the kind of BCD instructions a calculator would need. The result was a 4-chip "set" of which the 4004 was the processor. You seem to imply that the 4004 led to the 8008 but that would be a misconception, the 4004 as an architecture did not lead to anything as far as I know... although the notion of using a general purpose chipset which was pioneered in the 4004 did catch a lot of interest. There was parallel work being done at about that time at Intel and at TI - I ended up getting involved with people at TI so my view might be a little biased. The 4004 project was one of the developments that got me to change my engineering direction from discrete logic design to microprocessor design, along with the 8-bit work going on at TI. The 8-bit work was designed for terminals - thus the word size, which was appropriate for ASCII and EBCDIC manipulation. If memory serves, engineering work on the 8-bit systems was done pretty much in parallel with the 4-bit calculator work... but at Intel, the 8-bit work took a back seat to the 4-bit work, which actually had a paying customer. TI's 8-bit design produced working silicon in 1971, about the same time as the 4004 was completed, but a number of design flaws kept it from working as intended... Intel's 8-bit design (the 8008) was a little later but was much more functional. I don't know what Intel paid Busicom for rights to 4004 technology but would be interested to learn... I'm not sure why that would have been important given that the 8-bit technology for the 8008 was done in parallel and was also the design that took off... and Intel didn't need to share the 8-bit IP with anyone. Interested in any detail on the 4004 IP issue...