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Ted Hoff Talks About The Invention Of The Intel 4004
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."
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 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.
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?
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
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
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
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
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
4004 not found.
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...
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
right here
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.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
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.
"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.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.