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Intel 4004 Turns 30

Posted by michael on from the middle-aged dept.

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.

5 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The 8080 by Reality+Master+101 · · Score: 5, Informative

    In fact, here's Zilog's page on the Z80 still in production after 25 years! How many other computer technologies do you know that are still available after 25 years? Pretty remarkable.

    Talk about a company milking something for all its worth! :)

    --
    Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
  2. Re:Thirty Years...*sigh* by Monte · · Score: 2, Informative

    I recall the 6502 instruction set as being mingy when compared to the Z80 (for instance); I regarded that as a handicap at the time (this was 1981 or so) but it was probably a good thing for a beginning assembly hobbyist to cut his teeth on.

    This is true. The 6502 was a competitor to Intel's 8080. The latter was much more powerful (and the later Z80 by Zilog was like an 8080 on steroids), but the former was cheaper... IIRC something like $400 for the 8080 and $250 for the 6502 (and these are mid-70s dollars). Also the support circuitry for the 6502 was simpler, further reducing cost.

    Pardon if I got some facts wrong, age and alcohol have taken a good number of brain cells :)

  3. Re:PC predates the microprocessor by ch-chuck · · Score: 3, Informative

    here is my working Simon test/prototype board - I'd love to make a 'finished' one someday (given time, $$$, and a better, faster stepping relay).

    --
    try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
  4. One Hundred 4004s on eBay! by Caractacus+Potts · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  5. hacking the 4004 by trb · · Score: 4, Informative
    I hacked the 4004 when I was a student, back around 1977. My work-study mentor had a contract with Monsanto, working on the machines that made the very first production plastic Coke bottles. These bottles were heavy duty, like little dark green wiffle-ball bats. The bottles were taken off the market pretty quickly, because of some problem with the plastic they were made from. I still have one.

    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.