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Microchips That Shook the World

Posted by Soulskill on from the seismo-eighty-six dept.

wjousts writes "IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article on '25 Microchips That Shook the World,' including such classics as the Signetics NE555 Timer, MOS Technology 6502 Microprocessor (Apple II, Commodore PET and the brain of Bender) and the Intel 8088 Microprocessor. Quoting: 'Among the many great chips that have emerged from fabs during the half-century reign of the integrated circuit, a small group stands out. Their designs proved so cutting-edge, so out of the box, so ahead of their time, that we are left groping for more technology clichés to describe them. Suffice it to say that they gave us the technology that made our brief, otherwise tedious existence in this universe worth living.'"

4 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. All of them great by Kell+Bengal · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Even as a modern EE/robotics guy I use some of those parts today (555 timers in particular). I can't imagine the pain you'd have to go to to do some of the things they were used for in their heyday with discrete transistors and passive components.

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  2. The 8088? Oh, please! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    FTFA:
    Among the many great chips that have emerged from fabs during the half-century reign of the integrated circuit...Intel's 8088

    Wrong. The 8088 was a technical nightmare with a crappy architecture . It just got lucky. IBM's justifiable preference was Motorola's infinitely superior 68000. Unfortunately, the 68000 was 9 months to a year away form production and the 8088 was in production 'now'. IBM felt that it had do it 'now' or miss the market window, so they (reluctantly) went with the 8088. A combination of perfect timing, luck, great marketing form IBM and Intel then and superb marketing strategy from Intel (the best selling sow's ear ever) sealed its place in history as a marketing success, but by no means a technical marvel.

  3. Motorola 68k by newcastlejon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seriously! How many of us learned assembly with a 68k? How many are in service today. It's like the Mini/Beetle/Model T of the chip world: cheap, simple and with a practically cosmopolitan distribution.

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  4. 6502 and 680x0 both! by Slur · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yep, I learned my first Assembly Language on the 6502 back in 1983 or so, and had just started writing cool, fast game and utility software on the Atari 800 around 1985 using the very nice Atari Macro Assembler, when *boom* the era of Atari was over.

    So I moved to the Amiga and programmed that lovely machine in 680x0 assembler using the slick "DevPac" programming environment by HiSoft. Bad geek that I was, I never learned Intuition or any of the Amiga system calls, but went straight to the hardware for the titles I worked on, namely "Dino Wars" and "Bill 'n' Ted's Excellent Adventure" (apologies for both). Then *boom* the Amiga was dead.

    After a long hiatus from programming I got a PowerMac. On the Mac the first software I bought was the fringe macro assembler "Fantasm" by Lightsoft, thinking I'd be a Mac Assembler guru, but alas, Apple had moved from 680x0 to the PowerPC by that time, and only insane maniacs program that chip directly in Assembler.

    So finally, in 1995 I finally learned C, and a few years later C++.

    Of course nowadays I learn a new programming language every year and an entirely new framework or API every couple of months.

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