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Intel 4004 Turns 30
fm6 writes: "Just the thing to remind an aging geek of his mortality: this week marks the 30th anniversary of the Intel 4004, the very first microprocessor. Another historical page here, and a column bemoaning the absence of dancing in the streets here. Trivia -- why 4004? Because it was the fourth component in a 4-bit chipset." You might want to read the interview with Ted Hoff from a few months ago, it's pretty informative about the origins of the 4004.
The best way to celebrate would be the release of a new athlon ;)
"...you can steal my woman, but you ain't done nuthin' smart."
Is it still in production anywhere and what's the current record for overclocking one of these babies?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Unless you can port linux to this, why do we care? This is slashdot, we have standards!
Trapped in Time... Surrounded by Evil... Low on Gas.
Personally, I wasn't around back then. But looking at Intel's website looking at the predecessors to today's microprocessors really puts the accomplishments of the last thirty years into perceptive. It's staggering how far we've come in such a short period of time.
...pretty soon, it will start experiencing its midlife crisis.
Haha.
As I'm only almost 18, I've only been around for a little less than two thirds of its lifespan, but I'm impressed by the progress as well. I still remember playing Hard Hat Harry on the old Apple II/e in 4th grade and Where in Space is Carmen Sandiego in 5th. Now, I'm a hard-core Rogue Spear and Counterstrike player, so I appreciate everything that Intel has done for us. Here's to thirty more years, Intel.
4004 Not found.
--
The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
"this week marks the 30th anniversary of the Intel 4004, the very first microprocessor. "
What?
I thought Microsoft made the first microprocessor after purchasing the idea from Al Gore.
But, well, if they say so on Slashdot, it MUST be true.
-Shaunak.
Perhaps no overclocking and Linux, but -vice versa- there exists a 4004 software emulator for Linux (e.g., i4004em).
I thought it was something that provided hardware access to the processor?????
Every day is the 5nth anniversary of .055% of everything that ever happened, and as a rule we celebrate very little of it, or it would occupy all our time.
Do we really think the 4004 might be offended by the oversight, or that microprocessors in general aren't getting enough attention in the press? I think the computer industry as a whole could be modded down a point as it is.
The 4004 was certainly a significant milestone, but I think the 8080 launched in 1974 was truly the "Model T" of the computer industry. That was the chip that was general enough to really run everything. It was the basis for all the microcomputers and the CP/M operating system.
In fact, I believe Zilog Z80s (an 8080 clone with some extra instructions -- around 1977?) are still being manufactured as controllers in various products.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
That was back when they said we only need 16 bytes of memory, who will need any more...
(yeah I realize.....it's a joke.)
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
The 8008 was twice as powerful as the 4004.
If only naming conventions could make that much sense today . . .
Can anyone name the first true single-chip microprocessor? It has to have integrated RAM, ROM and I/O.
I remember stopping by the Intel booth at the National Computer
Convention in New York in 1971-1973 timeframe (can't remember exact
date).
My Dad had put me on a train to New York to expand my teenage
horizons. I returned with 4004 and 8008 data sheets and some chip
samples. I spent the next few months dreaming up what I was going to
do with the chips and drawing schematics.
I never did build anything with them, because owning a terminal and a
modem was more important to me at that time than a having a uP - if I
had had my priorities straight, I might be famous now [grin]. I did end up
designing and building 3 different video terminals, though.
Thanks for the memories.
-Rick
I had an Odyssey video console for my old B&W TV back in the day. It had a membrane style keyboard, which you could program assembly code in, and it ran on the 4004.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Seriously, with the crazy of emulators these days, even despite 4004's lack of anything remotely resembling memory protection or management... oh, on with the damn question:
HAS ANYONE PORTED LINUX TO IT YET?
about the 4004 development, right here - they were Intel's customer at the time.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
... the first microprocessor was older than UNIX
It seems a bit strange for me to think that first unix didn't run on a machine with microprosessor.
I always prefer the latest model.
According to The Chronology of Personal Computers (1969-1971):
The first production run of the 4004 was in December 1970. Admittably the production run had to be tossed due to mask errors, but 2nd and 3rd production runs in Jan and Feb of 71 were more sucessful (the 2nd run still had errors). Sample calculator designs were shipped to Busicom in March 71 - comprising 4 4001s, 2 4002s, 2 4003s and 1 4001.
The only relevance of November 71 that I can find, was that the MCS-4 microcomputer based on the 400x series was released. But thats not the microprocessor itself.
One thing that stands out, is that Intel have had production problems and bugs since day 1 :)
Does anyone know if there are any computer museums with these on display? I haven't hit the computer museum in Boston for a while, I'ld go to see this.
Um, this is my sig.
HAS ANYONE PORTED LINUX TO IT YET?
4 bit data registers, 640 bytes (yes, bytes) of addressable memory - I think I can safely say "no".
<obligatory_MS_bash>
But I hear Win 3.11 is coming along nicely. Thrashes like a bitch, though.
</obligatory_MS_bash>
According to this site, the first personal computer was Simon, c. 1950, a relay and paper-tape affair. You can argue with their definitions, but it has a lot of interesting historical machines.
MITS Altair really started the PC revolution, in that it was readily available, had a decent amount of compute power, and was affordable.CS and other hobbyists get all sniffly for the good old days. I was having a huge amount of fun a couple weeks ago hacking a 6502. That we even recall such an occasion should suggest to you that so long as some of us are alive, remembering and playing around with such artifacts defines who we are.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It is lesser known because the designer, Ray Holt, only received clearance to publish information about it in 1998.
I don't remember any computers built around this one but since there exists an emulator... it would make a nice pet project.
Greatest single guitar chord in music history: First chord, Time, Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon.
What, F#m ? No way. The CM7 at the start of the chorus is much better.
Damn, everything is turning 30 this year.
Ok, nostalgia. I'll buy that, I guess, but still...
I was having a huge amount of fun a couple weeks ago hacking a 6502.
You can actually do interesting and useful stuff with a 6502. With a 4004 you can build a traffic light controller. Once you emulate it, what are you going to do with it other than watch the bits in the registers change?
Oh well, different strokes for different folks. Don't mind me, I'm just crotchety today.
Since it wouldn't run Linux, it would make a nice Turing machine though...
I'm sure i'll miss a few but here goes,
Sorry the formatting is poor due to the lameness filter.
4004
4040
8008 8080 Z80 (Zilog) Z8000 (16-bit)
8086 8085 Z800 (Z80 extension)
80186
80286
386SX also IA468 (still born new archi)
386DX
486SX
486DX
486DX-2
486DX-4
Pentium, AMD K5, 586 (cyrix)
P-MMX P-PRO K6 686 Win chip
P-2 Celeron K6-2 686MX Win Chip II
P-III Cel(2) K6-3 ?
Coppermine Athlon Cyrix III
T-bird
P4 Tualatin Athlon XP
I've missed out the Xeons, and of course all the
microprocessors that didn't have some lineage
to the orignal 4004. Although the instruction
sets changed a lot particular from the 4004 to
8080 and from the 8080 to 8086, there is enough
similarity in there style and content to claim
that your Pentium 4 or Athlon XP is directly
descended from the 4004. It makes you wonder
if Intel can really expect to shift people from
the x86 arch to a totally new one.
Still utterly unused, in anti-static foam, three Intel 4004s. My roommate decided to start collecting old CPUs, and I managed to find these, free. I still want to make a very simple blinking-lights toy with one of these, and proudly put the "Intel Inside" sticker on the box :)
:)
Goddess, this brings back memories! Hanging out at the library, using their terminal to call (at 300 baud, that was *fast!*) the HP-2000 system at Harper College, and chatting with friends who had serious money (Jeff actually *built* an Imsai 8080 unit, though he got many of the parts free by schmoozing the sales person).
30 years, gads. Back then, having even a floppy disk was a wild dream, now we have 100+ gigabyte hard disks. Back then, having one whole K of ram was heaven - last week, I bought 512 meg for $20. Back then, the clock oscillator could be made from a simple L-C circuit, and it ran several hundred kilohertz. Now, it's a PLL-controlled internal oscillator, using an external crystal oscillator, all running at frequencies that make a microwave oven look slow.
All this, in thirty years. That *really* makes me feel old
Lemon curry?
So I suppose that it was Martians who invented the printing press, the Trébuchet, Allegro (a game library designed by a guy from England), and numerous other cool inventions. "I'm afraid of Americans. It sucks to fear myself."
A solution to the problem with music today
The moderators seem to be smoking more crack than usual lately...HOW THE HELL IS THE PARENT INTERESTING?...i think the correct response would be FUNNY
As I recall we had a Model-33 Teletype for software development. We punched the program into paper tape, called up a system using an acoustic modem and used their cross-assembler. Or maybe I'm just having an antacid flashback.
Wouldn't it be more appropriate to make a bigger deal when this thing is four thousand four years old? Or perhaps, when it turns 44?
I've been waiting for the year 2015 to be the first poster with the story. I was really looking forward to all the extra karma gained with the mod ups.
Dang, foiled again.
Sorry, couldnt resist
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
Here is a link that has a simple graph from the 4004 to the P7 (Merced Pentium II) that shows how Intel has obeyed Moore's law (at least until the P2.)
Jesse Wolfe Sr. Manager Systems Integration
Intel 4004 Turns 30
:P
from the middle-aged dept.
I'm 33 and that ain't middle-aged. I take offence!
/*drunk.. fix later*/
I don't know what kind of order you wanted this in, but if it's chronological order, the you need to do a bit of reordering. The 486DX (aka the 486) came out long before the 486SX (the SX was a model for cheapskates), and I believe the 386DX came out before the 386SX aswell.
wpoeayf.com
Note that the IEEE interview of Shima says:
> But he [Hoff] jumped into the room and said, "I found some ideas." But it looks to me there were almost no new ideas . . .
But the Hoff interview says:
> And again, the idea [of a general purpose computer] was basically rejected by the Japanese engineers but . . .
I'm very surprised to learn that there is a big discrepancy between the US version of history and the Japanese version regarding who invented the first microprocessor. For all these years I thought that Mr. Masatoshi Shima, formerly of Busicom designed 4004 inspite of lack of understanding and support from Intel. For example, link [1] writes (my translation): When Busicom approached Intel with the idea of designing an LSI to be used in calculators, Intel managers Ted Hoff and Stan Mazur showed little interest. Discussion went nowhere for many months. Then one day Hoff stormed into the room excited about "his" idea of creating a 4-bit ALU with 16 registers and 4 stacks, which was basically a rehash of Shimafs original proposal to create a chip based on the concept of "stored program." Moreover, Hoff designed only the arithmetic unit, which is the core of the microprocessor, so Shima had to write the spec and do the logic design for the rest of the chip all by himself. RAM, ROM, and I/O expander were designed by Federico Faggin, who had just joined Intel.
[2] [3]
Download Mazes and Puzzles from www.puz.com
Let's see here. OK! [click]
Displayed scale: Acutal size
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Gawd that brings back memories! Volunteering as a terminal aid in -- what was it? D building? -- for the free terminal time. Accoustic couplers... Teletype Model 33... DecWriters... None of this energy efficiency mamby-pamby stuff, no sirree! We're talking real equipment, the kind that would dim the lights when switched on, and could heat small houses. And 300 baud was so fast, so cool. Who could want faster than that? Boy, those were the days.
...I'm stopping now. The geeze-alarm just started going off...
Intel summed up the "speed" [sic] difference between a 4004 and a Pentium 4 with an interesting assume-this-basketball-represents-the-sun-like analogy: "Intel's first microprocessor, the 4004, ran at 108 kilohertz (108,000 hertz), compared to the Pentium® 4 processor's initial speed of 1.5 gigahertz (1.5 billion hertz). If automobile speed had increased similarly over the same period, you could now drive from San Francisco to New York in about 13 seconds."
both of those use more power than the crusoe.
There's a Dutch auction over at eBay with 100 of these little babies at $10 a piece. Just search for "Intel 4004". The date code on the picture shows that they were made in 1975, so they're not the ceramic and gold ones. Auction ends Thursday evening. Don't outbid me, or I'll mod you down.
But imagine a beowulf cl...
.13 micron technology, making them a tiny fraction of their original size ? Throw down a hundred of them on a board and have it run a massively parallelized app of some sort at 25 cents per node.
Hey, seriously, wouldn't it be groovalicious to have a bunch of 4004's produced using today's
Why the hell not ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Of course, it is best balanced with Mr. Hoff's interview, as they seem to have different ideas on how much everyone contributed, the language and technical communication barriers were definately there.
Bleh!
Still, the Z80 now is nothing to what it might have been. I remember when Z80/CPM systems were the standard for serious desktop computing. Even Apple II people used a Z80 card to run business apps. (There was a MS version -- their first hardware product!) I think this Apple/Zilog combo was the most common desktop business computer at one time. If things had gone just a little differently...
Actually... the first `microprocessor' was developed
by Motorola for the Grumman F-14 fleet defence
fighter, sometime in 1969. The story was covered
briefly in Flight International a couple of years
ago (sorry, I don't have the magazine to hand)
but Intel have questioned the claim, saying that
the Motorola design, although certainly revolutionary
does not qualify as a microprocessor.
See, for example, http://www.vintage.org/vcf99/press5.html
But Hoff did accomplish something important -- a lot more important than inventing a particular gadget. He demonstrated that simple general purpose computers could be built that could replace a lot of the complex custom hardware that was then being built. In so doing, Hoff started us down the road to making computers ubiquitous.
Its Saturday November 13th, 2011 And on slashdot, an article saying Intel 4004 Turns 40!
Its Friday Noveber the 13th (unlucky), and guess what, an article saying Intel 4004 turns 100! and as celebration Intel Release their Octium 8 Processor that runs at 1PHZ (1,000,000,000,000,000 hz!)
Yet all the nostalgic geeks try to run linux on the 100,000 hz processor. And fail miserbly as global warming as melted antartica and penguins became extinct!
You are bidding on one Intel brand P4004 CPU...looks like he has 100, but you are paying 9.99 for 1 to me. You want old parts cheap, go to bgmicro (they have a web site at www.bgmicro.com). I have used them for years (even before they did the internet thing, they are quick reliable and only subtitute if you confirm they can, and can get most things that are not in stock in 2 days or so. I have repaired and built things with very old type parts for cheap. Most notable are their power supplies, etc...its a geek-techno-hobbists home. Also try various other sites...like digikey...they are good too, I think they have a web site at http://www.digikey.com, and they have and awesome catalog.
If we take Moore's law and extrapolate. . . 33 years is 396 months, so technology must be 2^(396/18) = 4,194,304 times more advanced now than it was then. Did you guys even have fire yet, or were you still confined to nice warm Africa?
I think we need to call up Guiness (aside: isn't it strange that a record-tracking group also makes beer?) and update the records. This is a major archealogical find.
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
Is this the machine you saw? It was a M68000 box built by IBM. It looked more like a cash register than a PC as it had a large panel of membrane keys with which things such as sensors and lab equipment could be activated.
I think it never saw much acceptance (obviously). Must have been around 1983/84 or so?
At the time I thought this was Big Stuff. Unix on a microcomputer! But in hindsight, you really need a VM to have a serious modern OS. That's why there's no Linux for the 80286! I think the first commercial Unix to do this was CTIX, which Convergent Technologies created (System III/V, with the BSD VM, running on a 68010 with proprietary memory management hardware) for its MegaFrame box. The MegaFrame was a disaster (tried to be too many things at once), but it paved the way for the first 680x0 Unix boxes -- Convergent's main claim to fame before they were absorbed by Unisys.
Athlon turn 2 years old.
and intel still suckin for 30 years.
I have been collecting Intel CPUs for years and was wondering if anyone knows where I could possibly track down a 4004?
Anyway, a conveyor belt dropped bottles from a wheel going around (a horizontal disc) onto straight rows of pins, also moving. Required some trigonometry and timing, especially when starting the machines up. It was controlled by a 4004, the code lived in 7 256-byte uv eprom dip chips.
We had an assembler written in Fortran, it ran on either a Honeywell 1648 or a Dec PDP-10 (both notable machines in ARPANET/Internet history). When I got there, they used to type the hex assembler output into the prom burner by hand! Burning the 7 proms took 18 hours of person time, and was error-prone. I wrote some code to do the eprom download automatically, with a paper tape or something, cut the process down to an hour and a half, made some folks pretty happy.
If it was the first then why on earth did they call it 4004?
Microprocessors history date way back surely before the advent of INTEL. It is only because of the monopoly they enjoy now a days that so called 'Computer enthusiasts', who do not bother to check anything before they talk, think they single handed came up with everything. History is written by the winners.
Microprocessors and computing in general dates from the Cold War era, when they were used to try and guide missiles (e.g. Billistic Missiles) back in the 1950s and 60s. Long before there was ever such a thing as INTEL. If there is a 'first' Microprocessor it would probably be found in Military research labs, not in the lame labs of INTEL.
Why is Slashdot so sychophantic, so willing to be blind, about people like Microsoft and INTEL who only rose to prominence in just the last ten years? Before that they were just 2 in a long line of wanna be 'Techo wizards'. Both of them have REALLY crappy architecture. If it was not for those two we wouldnt have such games like Counter-strike and Quake III. Oh please! Look at those games very carefully. And what are these games in the greater scheme of things, even in the computer industry.
NOTHING. Less than nothing.
Rod.
Things celebrating their 30th anniversary:
* Intel 4004
* Michael Jackson's performing career
Coincidence?
The truth is out there...
...when I ask my PC for that chip, it just replies "4004: chip not found"
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
For details, see "Origin of the Species", by Ron Wilson, in a supplement to EE Times for Oct. 21, 1996. Was developed by Lee Boysel and others who had worked at Fairchild, and was called the AL-1. Was documented in detail in Computer Design magazine shortly after its introduction. Much of the design was placed into the public domain. Was the fastest micro until the 68000.
nbodley [at] world [dot] std [dot] com
nbodley
That's a very good question. On the one hand, they were quite far apart on the Unix family tree. On the other hand, I don't recall anybody abandoning their V7 ports and starting over with System III, when AT&T decided that the latter was the official commercial Unix. Probably everybody just folded in System III features. I'm guessing that V7 backward compatibility was never an issue, though I'm hardly the expert.