
Microchips That Shook the World - thomasjames
http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/25-microchips-that-shook-the-world
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linuxhansl
I am getting old. I remember I played with all of these when I was younger.
Z80 in my Sinclair ZX81 and later ZX-Spectrum, and then in an MTX-500. The
6502 in a Commodore C64, and an MC68K in an Amiga.

Long time ago... The ZK81 had 1KB or RAM, seems impossible to do anything with
that little RAM today. Yet, we wrote games with it.

I always feel a bit nostalgic when I read these kinds of articles.

What amazes me most is how easily one adapts to new technologies. These days I
take my 4 core laptop with dedicted GPU running Linux for granted and don't
think about it twice.

But that's also the fun part. I'm doing software for two decades
professionally now, and there is always something new to learn, something new
to pickup and explore! It's exiting, I hope to get to do this for another
decade or two.

It was also fun to be part of those "pioneering" year (albeit just as a user
of the technology).

~~~
mynameishere
_The ZK81 had 1KB or RAM...Yet, we wrote games with it_

The Atari 2600 had 128 _bytes_ of ram. It was well-known for its games.

~~~
kabdib
Some games were so hard up for memory that:

\- they used the port-direction bits in the parallel I/O chip registers as
temporaries. After all, you only care about user input for a tiny part of the
video frame

\- some games didn't use the stack . . . or not all the time. So the stack
pointer was just another register, too

------
Theodores
The MIPS R3K is deserved of a mention. This chip was at the heart of early SGI
workstations, the machines that pioneered everything 3D whether that be on
screen or in some GIS application. Although SGI were known for the movie stuff
that was the tip of the iceberg, when it came to meteorology, geology (oil)
and military applications a lot was possible thanks to SGI, and, by proxy, the
MIPS chips.

Later on there were plenty of gaming consoles that used the MIPS R3K series
chips. An expectation that games would be in 3D rather than 2D sprites came
along with it.

Clearly a lot of other innovations went on at SGI and around anything with a
MIPS chip, however, for a while it was the preferred option for any hardware
that did 3D.

~~~
Narishma
AFAIK, the only console to use an R3000 was the PS1. The N64 and PSP were
R4000 and the PS2 was a heavily modified custom R4000.

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vinkelhake
I'm not a hardware guy so I didn't really know what to expect from an article
about "microchips that shook the world". The title seemed somewhat hyperbolic.
I clicked on it to see if there was any mention of the 555, one of the few
"chips" I know about.

Some 20 years ago my sister's boyfriend and I made a simple "autofire" for my
Amiga. I guess it was some kind of bonding thing. An autofire was a piece of
hardware that you would hook up between a joystick and the computer. I didn't
know much about electronics so he put together the schematics. It involved a
555 and a potentiometer so that the fire rate could be controlled. I was good
enough with a soldering iron that he let me assemble the thing. Fun times.

(Turns out that the article had a few more chips I recognized.)

~~~
sokoloff
You may appreciate this 555 kit made from discrete components:
[http://www.evilmadscientist.com/2013/555-kit/](http://www.evilmadscientist.com/2013/555-kit/)

(no connection with them; I just think it's cool)

------
frozenport
When I think about Transmeta I see bad journalism on the part of the IEEE
Spectrum. Many read the magic show IEEE Spectrum article and incredulous
believe that the performance problems were due to low performing 16bit code
but when in-fact the idea at the core was flawed. They had recreated the x86
through shadow registers, the only performance gain would be to perform
serious optimization which is a job for a software compiler. When the demand
was right Intel pulled off Core line.

Transmeta didn't change anything.

------
ekianjo
The 68 000 from Motorola was not "just" in the Amiga and the ST and the early
Macs, it was also in the Megadrive, and in most of the early Sega Hardware in
the arcades (Outrun and AfterBurner 2 had dual-CPU boards using 68000 in
them). This chip was a wonder at that time.

~~~
mkempe
Fond memories! The 68k was also key to many embedded systems, such as laser
printers, the Mars Pathfinder, and cruise missiles.

~~~
ekianjo
Yeah, it even made it to the TI-92 calculator (a beast of a machine)

------
davidw
Interesting - to me at least - footnote: Federico Faggin attended the
University of Padova and is from Vicenza, not far from here. Sadly, like many
people in Italy in the past and present, it seems that he was a lot better off
leaving in terms of his career.

------
clef
An amazing trip down memory lane! I did so many things with the good old 741
many many years ago, my favourite being making a wah wah pedal from scratch,
very simple design, and then I had to go for distortions and phaser effects.
nice.

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Gracana
"Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the ICL8038" sure is amusing and
interesting. It answers questions like the one given in the article, and my
favorite, number 7: "This waveform generator is a piece of junk. The triangle
wave is non-linear and has large glitches when it changes slope."

[http://www.intersil.com/content/dam/Intersil/documents/an01/...](http://www.intersil.com/content/dam/Intersil/documents/an01/an013.pdf)

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kabdib
I'd love to have seen the 7400. There's not a board in the world that doesn't
have one of these...

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yuhong
What is funny is that in the end SPARC, PA-RISC, etc probably made things
worse because all the workstation vendors used the same 68K chips but they
each had different RISC architectures, meaning there was less volume, and of
course chip fabrication depended on volume.

------
sgt
I am currently reading Commodore - a company on the edge. Highly recommended
to anyone interested in the early days of microprocessors, the 6502, MOS
Technology, Chuck Peddle, et cetera.

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zemo
I'm a little surprised by the fact that none of the Atmel chips made the list,
considering how foundational the Arduino is for introductory DIY electronics.

~~~
userbinator
Given that Microchip's PICs didn't make the list, and that Atmel's AVRs used
in the Arduino make up an even smaller volume, I'm not surprised.

There is a whole world outside Arduino, and it's much, _much_ bigger.

~~~
Gracana
Microchip and the 16C84 made the list.

~~~
userbinator
Oops, my mistake.

But my point that Atmel is _much_ smaller than Microchip still stands.

------
aswanson
I bought many of these chips awhile back for fun retro projects. Anybody have
any suggestions on what to do with a 68000?

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ttflee
It was a 2009 article.

~~~
VLM
Yes, this kind of gave it away: "recalls Camenzind, who at 75 is still
designing chips"

Unfortunately, there are probably other examples of the recently deceased.

