Intel Releases 4004 Microprocessor Schematics

mcpublic writes, "Intel is celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Intel 4004, their very first microprocessor, by releasing the chip's schematics, maskworks, and users manual. This historic revelation was championed by Tim McNerney, who designed the Intel Museum's newest interactive exhibit. Opening on November 15th, the exhibit will feature a fully functional, 130x scale replica of the 4004 microprocessor running the very first software written for the 4004. To create a giant Busicom 141-PF calculator for the museum, 'digital archaeologists' first had to reverse-engineer the 4004 schematics and the Busicom software. Their re-drawn and verified schematics plus an animated 4004 simulator written in Java are available at the team's unofficial 4004 web site. Digital copies of the original Intel engineering documents are available by request from the Intel Corporate Archives. Intel first announced their 2,300-transistor 'micro-programmable computer on a chip' in Electronic News on November 15, 1971, proclaiming 'a new era of integrated electronics.' Who would have guessed how right they would prove to be?"

Comments

Zzzz

[KNicolson]

Get back to me once you've ported Linux to it.

And imagine OGG supporting a Beowolf cluster of them in Soviet Russia.

Re:Zzzz

[Scarletdown]

Get back to me once you've ported Linux to it.

And imagine OGG supporting a Beowolf cluster of them in Soviet Russia.

Well, Belgium! You had to go and use up most of the old standbys yourself. But you missed at least one...

I, for one, welcome our 4 bit overlords.

4004 tic tac toe

[Salvance]

The 4004 tic tac toe hardware from their unofficial site looks wicked ... http://mywebpages.comcast.net/jsweinrich/. I never thought I'd be drooling over electronic tic tac toe!

Re:Does it run Linux?

[gadzook33]

No, no, it's fine. You just need to cross compile with ARCH=4004; OPTIMIZE_FOR_CPU=4004; STRIP_EVERYTHING_EXCEPT_RESET_INCLUDING_THE_KERNEL =true.

Re:640k

[Reality Master 101]

Ah, back in the good old days when 640K _was_ enough for anyone...

Dude, my first computer had 256 Bytes (not K -- *BYTES*) of memory (Built form the September 1976 issue of Popular Electronics -- Build Your Own Microcomputer, based on the COSMAC 1802 processor). 640K was beyond freaking imagination.

Re:Fast-forward

[Mitchell Mebane]

ISA, as in "Instruction Set Architecture". Not the bus.

Re:Fast-forward

[jmv]

While not binary compatible, the 8086 was a 16-bit improvement of the 8-bit 8080, which was compatible with the 8008, which AFAIK wasn't too far from the 4-bit 4040 and the 4004... and that's why the space shuttle's boosters are sized according to a horse's rear end and a 64-bit quad core CPU architecture that is influenced by the first 4-bit microcontroller.

Re:how about minix ?

[TheRaven64]

It couldn't run Minix, and it would be quite hard to port Minix to it. It already runs on 8086 CPUs, so it doesn't need an MMU (or an FPU). Originally it came with 40-bytes of RAM, which is certainly not enough for Minix. It supports 12-bit addressing though, so you can address 4K-words. Unfortunately, the word size is 4-bits, so that means you can only address 2KB of RAM, which is definitely not enough for Minix. For reference, Bash is about 284 times bigger than the entire address space of the 4004. If you tied it with a custom MMU chip, you could possibly extend this to 4096 segments of 4096 words, giving you 8MB of total address space. This would be enough for Minix, but you'd need to do a lot of paging, which would slow down the performance of the 4004 chip a lot. It would probably boot in under a week...

Re:Digital archaeologists

[msobkow]

Before DivX pr0n there was MJPEG pr0n.

Before MJPEG pr0n there was JPEG pr0n.

Before JPEG pr0n there was bitmap pr0n.

Before bitmap pr0n there was ASCII art pr0n.

Before that, some weirdo was convinced that two LED's looked like nipples...

*g*

Re:Does it run Linux?

[mode13]

I can see it now:

From forums.gentoo.org / Architectures & Platforms / Gentoo on 4004 ...

Yea, I just did a stage 1 install, it took 12865 hours but the binaries are TOTALLY optimized!

Re:Railroad gauges

[Cadallin]

I really rather disagree with their conclusion. Although it was not "inevitable" the fact of the matter is that the rail road gauge that became dominant in the USA and Europe CAN be traced to the one adapted for rail use from carriages designed to fit on roads built to a standard specified originally by the Roman Legions based on the width of the asses of two standard war horses. That this is merely coincidental doesn't make it any less true, or less telling about the nature of beaurocracy and resistance to change. And the fact of the matter is that the standard does continue to affect rail shipping to this day, as it most definately determines what an oversize rail car or load is. Whether or not this actually had a direct impact on the Space Shuttle's SSRB's is less clear, although certainly they had to be designed so that they could be shipped from the factory to Cape Canaveral.

The thrust of the point to me, is the very point that nobody sat around and actually considered what might be a good rail gauge to adopt for shipping lines, they just went ahead with a horribly odd standard that was already in existence.

LED porn?

[Dion]

Like this?

http://www.gizmodo.com/archives/circuits-discover- each-other-024002.php