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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.'"

18 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. Print Link, The 25 in a list by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    PRINT ARTICLE (instead of the 5 separate pages):
    http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/8747

    The 25:
    1 - Signetics NE555 Timer (1971)
    2 - Texas Instruments TMC0281 Speech Synthesizer (1978)
    3 - MOS Technology 6502 Microprocessor (1975)
    4 - Texas Instruments TMS32010 Digital Signal Processor (1983)
    5 - Microchip Technology PIC 16C84 Microcontroller (1993)
    6 - Fairchild Semiconductor A741 Op-Amp (1968)
    7 - Intersil ICL8038 Waveform Generator (circa 1983*)
    8 - Western Digital WD1402A UART (1971)
    9 - Acorn Computers ARM1 Processor (1985)
    10 - Kodak KAF-1300 Image Sensor (1986)
    11 - IBM Deep Blue 2 Chess Chip (1997)
    12 - Transmeta Corp. Crusoe Processor (2000)
    13 - Texas Instruments Digital Micromirror Device (1987)
    14 - Intel 8088 Microprocessor (1979)
    15 - Micronas Semiconductor MAS3507 MP3 Decoder (1997)
    16 - Mostek MK4096 4-Kilobit DRAM (1973)
    17 - Xilinx XC2064 FPGA (1985)
    18 - Zilog Z80 Microprocessor (1976)
    19 - Sun Microsystems SPARC Processor (1987)
    20 - Tripath Technology TA2020 AudioAmplifier (1998)
    21 - Amati Communications Overture ADSL Chip Set (1994)
    22 - Motorola MC68000 Microprocessor (1979)
    23 - Chips & Technologies AT Chip Set (1985)
    24 - Computer Cowboys Sh-Boom Processor (1988)
    25 - Toshiba NAND Flash Memory (1989)

    ( mod me up so some karmawhore will find themselves FAIL'd )

    1. Re:Print Link, The 25 in a list by jo42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      They completely missed the 74XX series of chips. So much stuff was built with them back in the day...

    2. Re:Print Link, The 25 in a list by Mr+Z · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I'm not convinced. Some of these were just lucky, and rode the wave when the world shook, as opposed to shaking the world. The 555? Yes, truly sublime. The 741 op-amp? So fundamental, you couldn't imagine the world without it. But the 6502? A lucky near-clone of the 6800 that was popular not because it was particularly innovative, but because it was cheap. The 8088? The bastard stepchild of the 8086 which lucked out in getting picked over the 68000 in the IBM PC.

      Others are just interesting historical detours. Deep Blue and Transmeta Crusoe both were very interesting technologically, but they are in some sense interesting historical cul de sacs. The Explorer and related LISP machines, Intel's iAPX432, and the INMOS Transputer also hang out in this neighborhood.

      DMD? Ok... that one always felt as if it was a project that succeeded only by application of the principle that with sufficient thrust, any pig will fly.

      Anyway... I guess any list like this is subjective.

      --
      Program Intellivision!
  2. 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.

    --
    Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
    altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
    1. Re:All of them great by kbob88 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I'm continually amazed at all the stuff people get the 555 to do. Just google '555 circuit', and be prepared for some major geek accomplishments.

    2. Re:All of them great by NoMaster · · Score: 4, Informative

      As an old fart, I wonder why you'd rather use a microcontroller with all the attendant pickyness over I/O and supply voltage stability and noise and costing > $1 in bulk, over a 555 that'll work in fairly noisy conditions from 5~15v and costs a few cents in bulk.

      Horses for courses; just try getting your microcontroller to do something like flash an LED in a car without all the extra supply regulation and filtering. A 555 will do it with 6 additional components, including the LED, for less than $1 ;-)

      --
      What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
    3. Re:All of them great by NoMaster · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Sorry, should have said AU$ ;-)

      A PIC 10F200 costs AU$1.24 in > 25 quantities, compared to an NE555 at AU$0.429 / unit, AU$0.351 > 10+, or AU$0.26 > 250+

      And yeah, I was just poking fun at whippersnappers who automatically put a micro into everything. Don't forget to amortise the cost of your programmer hardware & coding time ;-)

      You also forgot the Vcc cap - don't worry, so did I with my mental zener-based supply. Don't want your regulator latching up or self-destructing on +- supply spikes, do you? ;-)

      (Aside: I once built a set of Knightrider lights for my car (OK, OK - feel free to poke fun at me for that but, in my defence, it was the 80's ;-) based on a 555, a BCD up/down counter, and a BCD-decimal decoder. I didn't filter the supply well enough, but that had the advantage of when it started working erratically by skipping lights or suddenly reversing direction, I knew it was time to change the distributor points ;-)

      --
      What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
  3. Re:386? by noidentity · · Score: 5, Funny

    Protected mode was just the x86 architecture welcoming itself back to the reality most other processors already inhabited.

  4. The 6502 - coulda, woulda, shoulda... by toejam13 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Interestingly enough, when Bill Mensch and company designed the 6501 (and later lawsuit modified 6502), they purposely made it very easy to expand it for future use. Although the chip was original designed for use in embedded solutions, several reports suggest that Bill Mensch, as well as fellow designer Chuck Peddle, saw the possibilities of the personal computer. This was around the time that the Altair 8800 was just released.

    Bill Mensch attempted to push Commodore for features that might be useful for a personal computer. However, Commodore management rebuffed him. Supposedly frustrated that Commodore management was as short sighted as the Motorola management that he had fled from just a few years earlier, Bill Mensch went on to start his own company designing successors to the 6502.

    Over at Western Design Center, Mensch and his sister designed the WDC 65C02, a bugfixed and enhanced version of the MOS 6502, that found its way into the Apple IIc and "enhanced" IIe. They also designed the WDC 65816, an extremely feature enhanced version of the 65C02 that included 16-bit index registers, 24-bit addressing, movable stack and zero page locations, and a host of new ops that allowed for jump tables and position independent code (useful with multitasking OSes and shared libraries).

    Just imagine if Commodore had the 65816 in 1980 and released a 16-bit successor to the PET that could handle up to 16MB without the weirdness of bank swapping or segmentation. It would have been very popular with programmers. Smoking the "what if" crack pipe even more, imagine if they ported TRIPOS to the 65816. :)

    Too bad they probably would have ruined it by bundling it with a chicklet keyboard.

  5. 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.

    1. Re:The 8088? Oh, please! by x2A · · Score: 5, Funny

      "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"

      Yeah, I hear ya, the architecture of a chip is much more important than whether it exists or not.

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    2. Re:The 8088? Oh, please! by Thomasje · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      The 8088 was a big step forward compared to the 8080, 8085, and Z80, which were the dominant CPUs for "personal computers" in the late '70s and early '80s. The 8088 could address one megabyte of memory without needing any external bank-switching hardware, and it had 16-bit registers throughout, and it could run at higher clocks than the aforementioned 8-bit CPUs of the time. Compared to the 64 kilobyte address space of the 8080/8085/Z80 and the 6502, this was a big improvement, and, as lame as it may sound today, a CPU with 16-bit registers and a 4.77 MHz clock was pretty fast compared to what existed in personal computers at the time.

      The 8088 really was a significant improvement. Yes, the 68000 was better, but it wasn't available in quantity yet, but perhaps even more importantly, choosing the x86 for the PC meant that software like WordStar and DBase and others, which was written in 8080 assembly language, could be ported to the new platform relatively easily. Porting 8080 code to the 68000 means rewriting everything; porting that same code to the x86 at least makes it possible to reuse some code -- because the x86 assembler can grok 8080 assembly language. Yes, you have to deal with the x86 segmented memory model, and with the differences between the CP/M system calls and those of MS-DOS, but those chores are still a lot less onerous than having to rewrite *everything*.

      Neither Intel nor Microsoft "got lucky" when IBM defined the PC architecture. Those were the technologies that made the most sense at the time.

    3. Re:The 8088? Oh, please! by Sanat · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I will never forget that it was in 1972 and I was troubleshooting a logic board for Wang Laboratories' 1200 Word Processor and I encountered a 4004 chip for the first time in a schematic. I realized at that instant that the whole computer paradigm would shift with the new types of chips and that the old computer methodologies would then become extinct.

      I never dreamed how quickly or how convincingly this would occur. Up to that time a computer for me consisted of a whole room full of a CPU and memory and now it all was on a small board with high density chips.

      That is when I realized that becoming a Cobol, Fortran and C programmer would be a way of extending my talents. Of course everyone who worked on a main frame knew the associated assembler code so the Intel assembler was just another assembler technique and it was taken pretty much in stride.

      Back then we did not even have ROM chips and so we used a wire laced through 44 coils and by strobing the wire,a 44 bit readout was produced which included the next wire to strobe. Depending on whether the wire was laced through the coil or around it would determine if the value was a 1 or 0. Doctor Wang was a genius when it came to those early designs.

      --
      And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
  6. Crusoe was a failure by YesIAmAScript · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It was nothing special at all and it definitely didn't shake the world. It didn't lead to a bunch of devices using it and it didn't lead to a new path for computing

    The presence of this chip on here makes no sense to me.

    Oh wait, I just got to where they talk about a Micronas MP3 decoding chip. So I guess this list is a little hit or miss.

    I could hardly agree more with the Chips & Technologies AT chipset being on this list. It may have been more important to the success of the 8088 than the 8088 itself was. All of a sudden making a PC clone was easy, and inevitably it became the standard, so standard that now even Macs use the PC architecture.

    --
    http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
  7. 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.

    --
    If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
  8. 8088 - Gakk! by swm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The 8088 is a twisted, flawed architecture.

    In true QWERTY fashion, it got a lock on the market by solving an immediate problem: the need to get beyond a 16-bit address space in a single-chip microprocessor. We are hamstrung by its limitations to this day.

    See

    Limitations of the IBM PC Architecture

                            or

            The Curse of Segments

    http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/rants/pc.html

    1. Re:8088 - Gakk! by Thomasje · · Score: 4, Informative

      What rock have you been living under? The linked rant/article is from 1992! Contrary to what it says, the limitations of the 8088 architecture *were* overcome by the 386, but that article was written before DOS extenders allowing protected-mode applications became common, never mind Windows adding protected-mode support. The Windows world has had a flat address space for many years now, and the segmented aspects of x86 are only supported for non-performance-critical legacy code.

  9. 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.

    --
    -- thinkyhead software and media