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.

Comments

Re:The 8080

[Reality Master 101]

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! :)

hacking the 4004

[trb]

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.