As usual when trying to sound like the final authority on some (any) subject, you have no clue what you are (trying to) talking about.
The 4004 was - or rather came to be - the first microprocessor and thus, generally Intel is perceived to be the inventor of the microprocessor, quasi got the Bay Leaves for that.
Which, slightly to support your claims, was nothing but a coincidence. What happened is as follows:
Back in the early 70s the world leading Japanese desk top calculator companies dropped their mechanical designs and one by one went the LSI way - or, as Sharp claimed, the XLSI way. Now, since back then all the semiconductor know-how was still concentrated in the US (and not yet stolen by or sold to the Japanese), each of them contracted their Bay Area company of choice to develop their chip-set. Ricoh went with AMI, Sharp picked Autonetics (to become Rockwell A. division) and Busicom went with - well, Intel. At Intel, highly creative systems architect Ted Hoff came up with the brilliant idea of doing a programmable chip-set, with the micro-program stored in ROMs with so called EPROMS (erasable programmable ROMs) to hold the micro-program. That's how the 4004, the 1602 and the famous 1702A were born!
Now, when the chip-set was ready to delivery their sole customer Busycom went belly-up, which left Intel with a solution on hand but no problem for it to solve :(.
So, some clever marketing guy came up with the idea of trying to sell it to the open market. The only problem being, that how-to-use documentation would have to be developed for the customers. This task was brilliantly commissioned to some ex DEC guys, who developed a set of mnemonics and a fat book to go to be offered to the general market. Now, coming from DEC, where Octal was king, they assigned the mnemonics to octals, while the 4004 was a 4 bit per cycle vs DEC 3 bit multiples, hex vs octal.
Having the mnemonics riding in part (3 bits) on one processing cycle with the final bit being ready for the next mnemonic only, obviously screwed up any kind of programming...
That said and done, a couple of customers world wide did indeed recognize the possibilities of this genial processor design and just created their own hex (4 bit) mnemonics matching the program cycles of the 4004. A customer of mine, Radiometer in Copenhagen came up with a revolutionary bilirubin meter heart of which was the 4004.
Much of the credit for pioneering the how-to-use the 4004 goes to Matt Biewer of Prolog Corporation, Monterey, CA, though. He wrote a full new set of docs of "how to use" the 4004, created a set of easily understood and used mnemonics and with his company taught micro processor programming courses world wide for the tutorial PL also made their own develop systems and 1702A prom programmers, all of which around 1974-1980 became a whole new business by itself.
The most efficient 4004 programs were actually handwritten on long pages of paper glued together and hung on the wall! Very easy to understand indeed. The stack, an internal register, of the 4004 was only 4 words deep, which was improved with the next and final 4 bit uP from Intel, the 4040, which at it's time was by far the most versatile micro controller in the world.
Next, of course, every semicon vendor had to match the Intel invention (yes, they were first guys in town!) with the F8, Z80, 6800 et al, all of them being 8 bit machines like the Intel 8008 and later 8080.
CJ, study your books first and then teach history, OK? Or, like me, I was part of it back then, part of the worldwide semiconductor industry, where we invented networking long before we had a name for it :)
/Taro |
