Historians Recreate Source Code of First 4004 Application

mcpublic writes "The team of 'digital archaeologists' who developed the technology behind the Intel Museum's 4004 microprocessor exhibit have done it again. 36 years after Intel introduced their first microprocessor on November 15, 1971, these computer historians have turned the spotlight on the first application software ever written for a general-purpose microprocessor: the Busicom 141-PF calculator. At the team's web site you can download and play with an authentic calculator simulator that sports a cool animated flowchart. Want to find out how Busicom's Masatoshi Shima compressed an entire four-function, printing calculator into only 1,024 bytes of ROM? Check out the newly recreated assembly language "source code," extensively analyzed, documented, and commented by the team's newest member: Hungary's Lajos Kintli. 'He is an amazing reverse-engineer,' recounts team leader Tim McNerney, 'We understood the disassembled calculator code well enough to simulate it, but Lajos really turned it into "source code" of the highest standards.'"

Comments

And best of all

[Dusty]

You can still run it on the latest Intel x86 chips. ;)

slashdot headline, 2057:

[circletimessquare]

"Historians Recreate Source Code of First 404 Error Message"

(truth be told, quick scanning the headlines, that's what my brain registered)

Re:Only 1024?

[DragonWriter]

Would you rather the MS guys spend time seeing if they can force their 114k application down into 10k, or perhaps writing an operating system that doesn't suck?

It'd be an improvement if MS did either.

Re:I hate to be a pendantic jerk, but...

[urcreepyneighbor]

Your hand?

zing!

Quickly -- someone send this to MS

[Eberlin]

Quick, someone send this over to the folks who wrote Excel!

the output is

[geekoid]

58008

Where's the update?

[lseltzer]

I found a buffer overflow. Exploit code to follow...