Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Technology

Ted Hoff Talks About The Invention Of The Intel 4004 70

Posted by michael from the abacus-XP dept.
An AC sends us this interesting piece - "I recently came across this not-so-new interview with Ted Hoff, the inventor of the first CPU in the world - Intel4004. It's fascinating reading: the birth of the chip, the dispute over credibility, patent filing and his later life with Atari."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Ted Hoff Talks About the Invention of the Intel 4004 More

Ted Hoff Talks About the Invention of the Intel 4004

Comments Filter:

  • He only invented the packaging. Big Deal (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The Microprocessor as a concept had been around for a long time; as multiple chips on a single circuit board. The old Prime computers for on example had a plug-in board labeled "Microprocessor" way before the 4004. He just took the next logical step and packaged it into a single chip. Why he gets credit for something so trivial I can't understand.

  • very interesting... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Very informative link. It'd be nice if it were on the front page, so you can sort of compare the two stories.

  • Stan Veit owned that store... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...in the back of Polk's; I visited him there a few times, and wished I could afford one of those kits. I remember he had a Sphere kit, and maybe one assembled (but not working?) in stock. Really fascinating place!

    There was one other store in Manhattan at around the same time. IIRc, they had set up a Dazzler-like display on a machine with its monitor pointed out at the sidewalk. Story goes that so many people were attracted to it that the police politely asked the store not to continue showing it. However, I do not trust my memory of that.

    Stan went on to become the moving spirit of Computer Shopper; was a genial (and slightly subliterate) guy.

    I was a midnight hacker in 1960 (on the BWEWS DIP in Colo. springs, before the COC went under the mountain), so I learned my basics extremely well. When I heard of the Homebrew Computer Club (?), it sounded very interesting, but I was in a psychological bind back then and didn't follow up on it. These guys were building their own machines *before* the 4004 came out, and the AL1 chipset was probably not available, or if it was, was 'way too expensive. Some homebrew machines might have been all-discrete.

    Enby in Waltham

  • Hmmm (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    March 3, 1995

    Yes, this is timely. *cough*

    This also just in. Kennedy was shot.

  • Masatoshi Shima (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For a different but nethertheless even more interesting perspective please also have a look at Mr. Shima's interview http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/o ral_histories/transcripts/shima.html He was Busicom's (the first customer) and designed the 4004 with Intel.
  • No...I'm having problems as well, reading it from my Win98-equipped work machine. I'm guessing it's Macintosh smart quotes that no one bothered to strip.

    -lee
  • Dude - go read the article, it was a japaneese company.
  • The early uProcessor market almost died due to
    massive failures in consumer electronics such
    as overproduction of hand calculators and early
    computer games. A few intrepid companies like
    Intel kept the faith.

  • Maybe if you had read the interview, you would know exactly how close to yet far away from the truth you sound :)

  • Part of it at least is the fact that it was a four bit processor, if I remember right
  • as far as I know, they moved most of their stuff out of lubbock--they are in dallas now, I think--the buildings that they used to be in is now (partly) a southwestern bell tech support call center.
  • I and a buddy built a couple of MOS Technology 6502A's with a cubic architecture in 1974-75. Actually, they were alternating 6502As and 6512As (they accessed memory on opposite clock values). We put 1K of memory shared between each pair of processors, leaving 2K for the OS (executive) in each processor's memory map (8K only). We didn't have enough money for more memory or real keyboards, so we used a bunch of microswitches glued together as a hex keypad, and 8 nixie tubes for output.
  • My memory may be suspect, but I thought it had an eight bit accumulator. I wrote an executive for it in 1974. Biggest problem was to create a multiplier in less than a page of 256 nibbles, so I could calculate Fourier Transforms with it.
  • "Texas Instruments invented the integrated circuit, microprocessor and microcomputer. Being first is our tradition."

    I read about TI's integrated circuit invention, hand wired components. They totally missed the point about integrated circuits. Others were advancing the technology in ways that we still use today and TI gets the patent using technology that was abandoned before it even got started. Makes sense to me.
  • <i>Maybe their 4004 is screwed up?
    </i>
  • According to this
    <A href="http://member.nifty.ne.jp/handheld/calculato r/busicom/busicom.html">link</A>, the designer of the 4004 was Masatoshi Shima.<BR><BR>
    To see the Intel/Busicom agreement, click
    <A href="http://www.busicom-corp.com/intel.html">h ere</A>.<BR><BR>
    To read about the Busicom calculator, read
    <A href="http://www.asiaweek.com/asiaweek/features/ao c/aoc.icons3.html">this</A>.<BR>&lt ;BR>
    <A href="http://www.busicom-corp.com/4004g.gif">Im age</A> of the 4004.
  • From "view source"

    <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="User-Agent: Mozilla/3.0Gold (Macintosh; U; PPC)">

    Netscape did this?

  • That product led to some rather interesting side issues having to do with intellectual property. In the case of the 4004, we felt that was an Intel proprietary design and therefore we thought it would reasonable to try to protect it. We spoke to our patent attorney, a fellow whose name was Stuart Lubitz, but Lubitz said he did not want to write a patent on a computer. He said they werenít worth it and essentially he refused at that time to write a patent. And I can see why. Subsequently I came across the patent that was written on the IBM 360 computer and it runs something like, I think itís around 900 pages of drawings and another 900 columns of text, or something in that order... itís an enormous document. We said that itís too easy to design around a patent of that type. And I think he felt the idea of putting the computer on a chip was a fairly obvious thing to do. People had been talking about it in the literature for some time, itís just... I donít think at that point anybody realized that the technology had advanced to the point where if you made a simple enough processor, it was now feasible.

    now, if only patent lawyers these days still thought like that.

  • have we emulated this yet ???

    Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.
  • All you classic gamers:

    Good inside-look at Atari's collapse down toward the end of the interview.
  • The whole design of the 4004 is like a Rashomon story in real life -- everyone thinks they are the main contributor.

    Four people are credited with designing the 4004: Ted Hoff, Stan Mazor, Federico Faggin and Masatoshi Shima.

    There are evidently bad feelings between Faggin and Hoff because Faggin feels he did all of the real work, and Hoff got much of the credit. Many accounts do not give Shima any credit, only giving credit to the three Intel engineers (Shima was an engineer at Busicom, a Japanese calculator company at the time, and later became an Intel engineer).

    Interview with Shima (extremely interesting and detailed) [ieee.org]

    Another interview with Shima [osaka-u.ac.jp]

    Interview with Hoff [stanford.edu]

    An e-mail from Mazor, and nice pictures of the 4004 [smu.edu]

    A really nice picture of the 4004 [intel.com]

    A picture of three of the engineers (no Shima) years later [intel.com]

    A picture of all four engineers [chipanalyst.com]

    Federico Faggin's initials on the 4004 -- the only initials on the chip [fsu.edu]

  • Sometime back, I posted a note about the origins of the 4004 to comp.arch -- Stan Mazor, one of the engineers on the project replied with his take on how the credit should be split up.

    This is his list, re-formatted in HTML:

    1. Shima of Busicom specified ~8 custom chips, but there was some micro-coding for floating point operations using 16-digit primitive operations like shift left, add, subtract, etc.
    2. Hoff believed there were too many complex special chips and that the micro engine was too high a level to be practical for Intel to design and build and proposed an alternative architecture.
    3. Hoff proposed a simpler architecture using 4-bit data path and simple instructions based upon the PDP-8 model we were using at Intel to run 'Focal' programs.
    4. Shima and Busicom opposed the Intel architecture at first. When I joined in Sept 1969 I was a computer designer for more than 3 years and just worked on Symbol at Fairchild, and did logic design on decimal floating point unit (like calculator).
    5. Hoff and I did program 'snipets' to prove how we could code the '4004' to do calculator functions. I suggested enhancements to ISA including; JIN, FIN, and FIM, and some other minor stuff. The 4001- 4004 architecture was refined by Hoff and Mazor thru Dec. 1969, and by Jan 1970 Busicom agreed to our architecture.
    6. The highlights of the architecture are explained elsewhere but include: on chip dynamic RAM for stack and registers, 4-bit data path, time multiplexing 16-pins, and I/O ports integrated on memory chips with local instruction decoding.
    7. Faggin joined Intel after architecture was completed. Faggin did all logic design, circuit design, layout, production supervision, testing, etc. Faggin also 'invented' how to do capacitor with silicon gate which had very low gate/diffusion capacitance for bootstrapping amplifier for dynamic logic circuits.
    8. Shima did all final calculator code, layout checking, logic checking and greatly contributed to the success of project; he also changed 2 instructions BBL and ADDC.
    9. Intel filed patents on unique features of 4004, and the holders are Hoff, Faggin, Mazor.
    In summary split the credit as follows;
    • Noyce supported Hoff's proposal.
    • Vasdasz was Hoff's boss and supported Hoff's choice.
    • Shima/Busicom proposed using ROM coded routines.
    • Hoff proposed simpler architecture and micro-coded vs special chips.
    • Mazor helped refine ISA and chip architecture and wrote test code.
    • Faggin did all chip design and took over 'ownership' of project.
    • Numerous Intel employees helped in: mask layout, testing, packaging,etc.
  • I think you mean first single chip cpu : )
  • a motorized abacus?
  • Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present (V 12.0.2) [sympatico.ca]

    its a cool read.. starts with the 4004.. covers a bunch of jazz.. odd processors, all kinds of crap
  • "Fact: Most TI stuff is built to almost military specs: the home computer's cards were cased in cast aluminum."

    Didnt the military (in the states) put a block on ordering any more of their chips after one screwed up and took out a pretty expensive plane/satellite or something?

  • But perhaps the worlds first microprocessor. The worlds first all solid state CPU, made from descrete logic, was built in 1960 for early fighter jet navigation. The unit had an 18 bit instruction/data path and 2Kb (thats bits!) of memory which at the time cost ~$1.00 a bit!
  • It's quite interesting that Hoff repeatedly talks about Intellectual Property and patent issues from back in 1971. It seems that this isn't just a modern problem, but that the US patent office has always been somewhat broken.

    Actually, I was poking around the other interviews (tweak the URL to get there - someone knows good web design!) and ended up with Moore [stanford.edu]'s interview (You know, Gorden E Moore? From whose business ventures damn near all of our IC technology sprung?) where he talks about the same stuff with Rob Walker.

    RW: Ah, one of the questions that has come out of a number of lawsuits as of recently, that here on the west coast, in silicon valley, we didn't patent circuit designs or computer aided design for that matter. And as a result, we never patented at Fairchild the ROM and the RAM. Intel never patented the microprocessor... and others did. East coast companies or TI in particular, took our work and patented it. How come we never recognized the importance of that... circuit development?


    GM: Well, it was probably a different attitude about patents. One thing that happened in the semiconductor industry... semiconductor processes are a long series of steps and the patents had gotten pretty broadly spread because all of the people working on the technology had some of them. And the net result was in order for any of us to operate we had to be cross-licensed so the participants tended to all cross-license one another. So, there was not a tremendous advantage to having more patents... with a couple of exceptions, there wasn't much net benefit from it.

    What we never anticipated, I guess, was a lot of other participants were going to enter the business later on. So, at Fairchild we tended to patent relatively few things, typically the ones that we thought we could police most easily and were the most difficult to get around, you know, the more fundamental things. But, I was responsible for a lot of those decisions. I remember one in particular that, in retrospect, is kind of funny. In the early days of the integrated circuit, Bob Norman, one of the people who were involved there, suggested the idea of semiconductor memory... the whole idea of how semiconductor flip-flops could be used as a memory structure, and I decided it was so economically ridiculous, it didn't make any sense to file a patent on it.

    Holy shit, how's that for a killer of DRAM patents?

    Another fine clip:

    GM: Well, you ask about patenting on the microprocessor and frankly, we didn't think the microprocessor per se was that patentable. What we had done was take a computer architecture and make it all on one chip instead of on several chips. And that was kind of the direction that the integrated circuit technology was pushing in anyhow, always putting more and more of the system on a chip. What TI did was then start saying: 'Well, a microprocessor with a keyboard is an 'invention,' and I'll admit, I never would have thought of filing patents on those things that TI got issued patents for.

    Just thought you might like to see it.


    --
    ALL YOUR KARMA ARE BELONG TO US

  • During college (ten years ago), I met a guy who was stockpiling 4004's. He used to work for BC Tel (a telco in Canada), and figured that they'd be worth something someday. I doubted that they would be.
  • i don't think this is the first CPU. as far as i know, i was taught some japanese companies were working at the same time on a competitive CPU. and some company selected the 4004 for its calculator or something. no this is not a fairy tale. this is how i was taught.
  • Yes. The IBM360, Univac etc had CPUs long before Integrated electronics developed the 4004 for a Japanese calculator company!
  • kinda funny typo: TH: Well, it went away for a while but itís popped microprocessor again recently.

    apparently, the transcriber initially used the abbreviation "up" for "micro"-"processor" (there being no "mu" key on the keyboard). Then, a slip of the finger during the query-replace and we get "popped microprocessor"

  • Anyone know if the video for the interview is available anywhere?

  • Perhaps I am a little late here, for which I apologise...but just last year the nobel prize(physics) fo r the invention of the integrated circuit went to...

    A physicist at Texas Instruments...

    I am affraid that the nobel commitee will be most distressed that they have given the prize to the wrong person...

    PS... first commercially available microprocessor is about all you can say for the intel 4004... plus whatever the spin doctors want to add... sort of like that guff about ENIAC being the first computer.

    have a better one

    qbed

  • Does that include biological CPUs?
  • They are [ebay.com] worth something.
  • First CPU was developed by the US Government for use in the Guidance system of their ICBM's. Yes thats right, the entire microelectronic movement was pushed forward by the US governments need for smaller more accurate weapons of mass destruction.
  • You heard it here first!

    ------

  • Dude, do me a favor.....Shut the Fuck up.

    Thank You
  • Maybe their 4004 is screwed up?
  • that nobody likes a smartass? ;) I mean, born in '37 and graduated from RPI in '54?
  • If I recall correctly, Intel built an early version of what became the 4004 under contract to DataPoint Corp, but the chip failed to meet performance spec's, and Datapoint walked. The Intel guys thought they had a possible winner anyway, and went ahead.
    Not to knock Datapoint; they had the earliest commercial ethernet system around. Very much an innovator.
  • Hm. I bought one off ebay a few months back and paid about 1/3 that price.


    ...phil
  • I see tons of funny characters in places of punctuation marks such as quotes and apostrophes, which detracts from the reading.

    Is this some proprietary Microsoft encoding that's not available in Netscape on Linux or what? I tried switching various encodings to no avail.

  • Of course, Michael means the first microprocessor.

    After the first 8008-based personal computers within the range of a hobbyist came out, a friend and I took the train from Long Beach (N.Y.) into Manhattan, with the goal of visiting all of the computer stores that day. There were three. The biggest was in the back of Polk's hobby shop. There, a salesman toggled a program into an Altair to make the lights go back and forth (this might even have been before the Kansas City tape interface was developed, because the computer clearly didn't have any nonvolatile media). I think one of the stores was closed or out of business, and the other store had an Altair in a box and they opened the top flap just so that we could see the top of an Altair in a box - that's all the proof they had that they were actually selling a computer. So, that one in the back of Polks was the only working personal computer in a store in Manhattan that day.

    Bruce

  • "
    We spoke to our patent attorney, a fellow whose name was Stuart Lubitz, but Lubitz said he did not want to write a patent on a computer. He said they weren't worth it and essentially he refused at that time to write a patent."

  • ..a beowulf cluster of these!!

    On a more serious note, I really am curious; can anyone make any claims for a producing a cluster-type machine using the oldest CPU possible ?
  • What is the state of Occam? I recall wanting a bunch of T9000s (or am I mixing up the name with the terminator?) because my amiga 500 blew at 3d rendering.

    But that was a long time ago. Still, it woudl be cool to revive these old computers. Can anyone confirm or deny the rumor that Yale sold a CM-1 a few years back for $500, becaues they needed the floor space and it was a hassle getting parts?

  • Semiconductor mask works are protected under Title 17 of the U.S. code [cornell.edu], the same title that contains copyright law and the DMCA. They are protected for between ten and eleven years after registration or first demonstration (e.g. at a trade show). [cornell.edu]

    Patents, as usual, last for 20 years after filing.


    All your hallucinogen [pineight.com] are belong to us.
  • It was never patented

    Amber Yuan 2k A.D
  • One of the many rather informative site on camputer history can be found here [smu.edu], complete with pictures, and something of a context of the start of the industry. I'm sure that a search using your favorite search engine will pop up more.

  • Fact: BigBlockMopar works for Texas Instruments.

    Ha! I wish!

    Resumes are available, I'd move to Lubbock in a second.


  • Hah! I had a TI 99/4A and that giganto "military spec" expansion housing was fucking ridiculous. (I wouldn't be shocked if it was a converted minicomputer part.)

    It was. TI has often said that the whole system architecture of the TI-99/4A was a scaled-down TI-990 minicomputer system.

    There *are* a few problems with it, though - and they're all based on the fact that when the computer was designed and introduced in 1979, more than half of the cost of the system would have been the 16k of RAM that it had, had the RAM been a full 16 bits wide.

    For cost reasons, sadly, they multiplexed the bus down to 8 bits outside the system, and put all the RAM onto the TMS9918 video processor. All RAM was then called through the video chip. Slow.

    There was some cache RAM on the 16 bit bus, and if I recall correctly (been a while since I fired up Editor/Assembler on one of those things), there was also some 16 bit wide scratchpad built into the TMS9900 CPU chip.

    One of the more popular recent TI-99/4A hacks has been to stick static RAM chips on top of the cache RAM, build some address decode logic, and actually move the 32K RAM expansion onto the 16 bit bus. 30% speed increase with only a few wire-wrapped connections, it's very nice.

    Amazingly overbuilt. But most of the TI systems that ended up with collectors still work to this day. You can't say that about Commodore 64s, with their *lovely* aluminized cardboard RF shields and high-performance serial disk drives.

    Anyway, nobody wanted military spec expansion at the twice the cost of the computer. Users wanted cheap slots and cards like Apple and IBM had.

    That problem was more TI's marketing department's fault.

    Their idea was to saturate the market with consoles, which were built (relatively) cheaply. And then, TI was going to make their money as people lined up to buy disk systems, memory expansions, speech synthesizers, etc.

    TI agressively tried to stop other companies from making hardware or software for their systems. They suppressed technical information on the system and went so far as to design a "Version 2.2" QI-console, which ignored the aftermarket cartridges that hadn't been made by TI. So, while MunchMan was a good game in its own right, you couldn't play PacMan on a V2.2 TI-99/4A - that was an Atari-made cartridge.

    Unfortunately, they completely overestimated the interest that most people would have in their computers. On the other side of the coin, they underestimated things, too: as shipped, the TI-99/4A was pretty useless. It was assumed that people would program in BASIC as a hobby, but that no one would ever want to go beyond that.

    It wasn't until 1981 - two years after the TI first came out - that the Editor/Assembler, MiniMemory and P-Code Pascal Development Systems came out. After all, in TI's view, no one wanted to learn a complicated programming language.

    Marketing also has to be blamed for their disastrous advertising. While Vic-20 boxes were screaming "Vic-20 - the FRIENDLY computer, with COLOR and MUSIC", TI's advertising was Bill Cosby looking lonely. Of course, the TI blew the Vic-20 - and arguably the C-64 - out of the water in *every* respect, but consumers still ran to the Commies.

    Towards the end, while TI-99/4As were selling in K-Mart for $99 each, it's estimated that TI was losing $50 on the sale of each one. They pulled the plug October 19, 1983.

    Great machine. Terrible execution.


  • I read about TI's integrated circuit invention, hand wired components. They totally missed the point about integrated circuits.

    For sure, Jack Kilby's invention was more about fitting two transistors into one package with reduced manufacturing costs, than it was about connecting the two transistors to each other.

    That followed very quickly, before TI made the IC public.

    As for the hand-wired, yeah, at the time, almost all transistors were what is called a "point contact" transistor. They weren't the familiar robust N and P sandwich that we know now. Back then, most transistors included at least one hand-wired connection. Logically, therefore, two transistors on one piece of silicon will require two hand-wired connections, and that's how it was. While mass-production is one of the most sacred features of our perceptions of transistors and ICs, back then, the one hand-made connection on each one wasn't considered to be a big deal: the alternative was still vacuum tubes, which often have a lot of hand-made connections. Take a close look at the inside of a vacuum tube and you might even see pencil-marks from the QC department on the plate.

    Point-contact transistors basically died out in the early 1960s. (Fragile, expensive, low beta, low power capability, noisy, inconsistent, etc...)


  • Didnt the military (in the states) put a block on ordering any more of their chips after one screwed up and took out a pretty expensive plane/satellite or something?

    Not that I've ever heard of. Working for a defence contractor, I've personally sold the United States Navy, Marines and Coast Guard several systems which had loads of TI parts in them. In fact, I often spec TI parts where possible, because their stuff is tough as nails.

    I think it would be rather tough to do that, anyway: open up *anything* that doesn't have highly integrated chipsets, and you'll probably see an array of SN74xx chips, all with the little TI logo on them.

    TI also makes ICs for a lot of other companies, too. I understand they fab for AMD, among others.

    As for the cast aluminum accessory cards, take a look at this [geocities.com]. Almost halfway down, you'll find a picture of an open "PEB". From left to right, the cards appear to be the "firehose" flex cable interface card and the 32k RAM expansion card (both in cast aluminum cases), a few empty slots, and then what appears to be a CorComp (aftermarket) RS-232 card and an unknown aftermarket diskette controller card. (You'll note that the aftermarket realized that TI was into overbuilding things.)

    That's their *home* computer stuff. Cast aluminum cards. You should see their industrial electronics.


  • Here's some more [wanadoo.fr] hopelessly overbuilt TI stuff.

    ...Misty, water-colored memories...

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • It depends on whether you really mean a microprocessor based CPU. We were running VAXclusters from the early eighties. This was around VAX 11/750s and 11/780s. Shared file-system, good distributed lock manager and all that stuff.

    The earliest clusters had some problems but by the late eighties the only thing stopping a VMScluster (as they later became known, to include the Alpha) was Digital's appallingly stupid management.

  • I spent the last hour reading the link. It's way cool.
  • Very Interesting. I'd never seen the resolution of this.

    If you go to the interview [stanford.edu] and search on "Hyatt" you come to the point where Hoff belittles Hyatt's patent, gives some lame implied demurrer about the design not being the implementation, blames the PTO for doing its job, and then admits that "royalties are being paid" to Hyatt, presumably by Intel and everyone else who constructs microcomputers.

    It's pretty easy to believe that if Hyatt's patent had no merit, or limited scope, or even if it had a disqualifying claim, then Intel, Compaq, IBM, Dell, Apple, and all those other 8,000-ton gorillas would have fought it in court, successfully, and they would not be paying Hyatt anything nor citing his numbers on their plastic.

    --Blair
    "In your patent application for The Universe, it is not necessary to provide a working model."

  • Wow -- A TI fanboy? (Score:3)

    by slothbait ( 2922 ) on Tuesday February 20, 2001 @09:30AM (#417642)
    It's been a really long time since I've seen one of those...

    There was an old joke in the industry that TI had grade A engineering and grade D marketing. They had all sorts of good products that no one used, and they suffered as a result. I think a lot of their lifeblood came from their early patents, which they gladly licensed to other companies.

    Of course that was the old TI. Recently they've totally recast themselves as a DSP company. They sold off product lines in most of their old markets, and focused on what they saw as an emerging market with the potential to be huge. It was a bold move, and it seems to have paid off for them. TI is doing pretty well these days, and it looks like they were right about the DSP market.

    Live and learn.

    --Lenny

  • prototypes not required (Score:3)

    by alienmole ( 15522 ) on Tuesday February 20, 2001 @11:10AM (#417643)
    Doesn't applying for a patent require that the applicant be able to show some evidence that they've made progress toward using the patented techniques? Shouldn't the patent office require a prototype in order to grant such a patent?

    Prototypes are not required. I believe there used to be a requirement along these lines, but it was dropped as inventions became too complex to justify this.

    All that is required in a patent application is enough information to allow people "of ordinary skill in the field" to make the invention.

  • Intellectual Property (Score:3)

    by SMN ( 33356 ) on Tuesday February 20, 2001 @09:44AM (#417644)
    It's quite interesting that Hoff repeatedly talks about Intellectual Property and patent issues from back in 1971. It seems that this isn't just a modern problem, but that the US patent office has always been somewhat broken.

    Doesn't applying for a patent require that the applicant be able to show some evidence that they've made progress toward using the patented techniques? Shouldn't the patent office require a prototype in order to grant such a patent? That way, TI wouldn't have been able to patent Intel's processor, because it only has the specs but no silicon. If they were able to get Intel's design docs and create first silicon before Intel did, then they would be showing evidence that they have improved Intel's ideas and might possibly have something worthy of a patent.

    So whatever became of these patents filed by TI and others? I'd imagine that they'd have expired by now, and Hoff says that the royalties were minimal because Intel had strong evidence that TI had stolen their patents - but even so, the patents did remain valid, correct?

  • Re:Question (Score:3)

    by anticypher ( 48312 ) <anticypher.gmail@com> on Tuesday February 20, 2001 @07:52AM (#417645) Homepage
    Easy. 4 bit bus, 4 bit architecture, and 4x4 bit registers (command, decoder, decoder control(mask) and interim). It had 45 opcodes, all hardwired into just 2,300 transistors.

    I used to have one, but gave it to a museum. Now on ebay they are fetching about US$100.

    the AC

  • Read the actual interview (Score:3)

    by elegant7x ( 142766 ) on Tuesday February 20, 2001 @08:36AM (#417646)
    It looks like TI had a habit of Patenting Intel's stuff, at least according to this guy. A lot of their design specs on the 8008 ended up showing up in Ti's patents.

    Another interesting note is that Intel didn't even bother to patent the 4004 because they thought the idea of putting a computer on a chip was 'obvious', and their patent guy thought it would be a pain in the ass

    Amber Yuan 2k A.D

  • Error (Score:3)

    by xFoz ( 231025 ) on Tuesday February 20, 2001 @07:11AM (#417647)
    4004 not found.
  • . . .I used to gun a computer in the USAF, that the CPU took up 4 cabinets, 3 of which were filled with magnetic core memory. This was a "minicomputer", circa 1963. . . . 200 Khz, 128K of memory

    The CPU, per se, took up 12 slots in a 3 foot by 8 foot cabinet. . .and it drove analog devices. It was "updated" with an auxiliary computer in the late 1970's, which used the early PC hobbyist's friend, the 8-inch hard-sectored floppy.

    The entire purpose of the system, was to drive a simulator for USAF B-52 Electronic Warfare Officers. Even in the 1980's, we had a heck of a time getting parts for it, and were screaming for a IC-based replacement. . . . 4004's would have increased performance several orders of magnitude...

  • ZMOB with 128 Z-80s. Transputers! (Score:4)

    by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Tuesday February 20, 2001 @11:12AM (#417649) Journal
    A long long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I think University of Maryland in ~1985, there was a project for a many-processor machine made with Z-80s, ZMOB, "the Computer of the Future, using the Processor of the Past". You can find several interesting stories on your favorite web search engine.


    Also, the Transputer was an early machine designed for clustering massively parallel systems. Each Transputer chip had four interfaces, which you could use to connect to neighboring machines in a big mesh, or build more hypercubish things with.

  • And here's Federico Faggin's story (Score:5)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 ) on Tuesday February 20, 2001 @07:25AM (#417650) Homepage
    right here [www.uib.es]

    He's the guy who bolted from Intel and started up Zilog (in a nutshell - detailed versions welcome).

    Excerpt: Three weeks after that disappointment, a new run came. My hands were trembling as I loaded the 2-inch wafer into the probe station. It was late at night, and I was alone in the lab. I was praying for it to work well enough that I could find all the bugs so the next run could yield shippable devices. My excitement grew as I found various areas of the circuit working. By 3:00 a.m., I went home in a strange state of exhaustion and excitement.

  • 4004 Not Found - or First, Either! (Score:5)

    by BigBlockMopar ( 191202 ) on Tuesday February 20, 2001 @07:52AM (#417651) Homepage

    Intel has often claimed that the 4004 was the first CPU chip. And it's generally accepted as fact.

    However, it's not.

    TI unveiled one in 1970. I can't even remember the part number because it didn't get any popularity, but itwas basically the entire CPU board from a TI minicomputer compressed onto one chip.

    The patent wasn't issued until 1973 [ti.com].

    "Texas Instruments invented the integrated circuit, microprocessor and microcomputer. Being first is our tradition."

    - TI Product Manual

    Fact: Texas Instruments makes more chips every day than Frito-Lay.

    Fact: Texas Instruments made the first 16-bit CPU chip, too - the TMS9900. It was used in TI-99/4A home computers and Patriot guided missiles.

    Fact: Most TI stuff is built to almost military specs: the home computer's cards were cased in cast aluminum.

    Intel is just an annoying little upstart, and the Pentium 4 is merely the continued evolution of the 4004, which was merely a hand calculator chip.

    Oh, yeah, and TI did that, too, also in 1971. Only, I'd submit that Intel didn't complete the job, the 4004 required support ICs. TI's didn't [ti.com].

Slashdot Top Deals

Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.

Close