scottt@tektronix.UUCP (07/08/83)
According to an article in Solutions (a bimontly magazine published by Intel),
Busicom, a Japanese calculator manufacturor, approached Intel in 1969 to
design a family of IC's to use in Busicom's next generation of programmable
calculators. Ted Hoff was assigned to the project. He concluded that what
Busicom wanted to do was beyond 1969 IC technology.
However, he had a PDP-8 sitting in his office. He realized that the control
logic for the PDP-8 was relatively simple - what made it powerful was the
(relatively) large amount of memory. He proposed to Intel management a set
of four chips: a CPU, a ROM, a RAM, and a shift register chip. They bought
the idea and had Federico Faggin (who later founded Zilog) do the chip design.
Busiscom decided not to use the Intel chip set - it was too slow. So Intel
had this set of four chips whose design costs had all been paid for (by
Busicom), and decided to try to sell them. Thus the 4004 (and 4001, 4002,
and 4003) were born. The first ad appeared in Electronic News in its
November 17, 1971 issue.
Not long afterward Intel started working on an 8-bit version of the 4004,
the 8008. Sometime after the tenth anniversary (around Dec. 81) one of
the trade journals (I think) published an article by some engineers at Intel
that explained the evolution of the 8008-8080-8086 architecture.
Scott Trappe
..!tektronix!scottt