
The Story of the Intel 4004 - shawndumas
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/history/museum-story-of-intel-4004.html
======
drallison
I wrote the native-code assembler for the 4004/4040 Intel Microprocessor
development system which was compatible with the cross assembler system that
ran on IBM 360 hardware. Tom Pittman wrote a eprom-resident assembler for the
4004 development board notable because the opcodes were chosen to allow the
table in which they were stored to be executable code in order to save space.

Coding for the 4-bit limited resource 4004/4040 necessarily involved being
very close to the machine. At the 2nd Asilomar Microprocessor Workshop the
virtues of coding for the 4004 in split-octal was hotly debated with Matt
Biewer of Pro Log, an early embedded systems house, arguing in the
affirmative. Those of use who supported higher-level programming languages
were in the lunatic fringe. Some even thought that assemblers were confusing.

~~~
aswanson
Wow, it must be amazing to write "Wrote first assembler for first
microprocessor" on your CV. Kudos.

 _Some even thought that assemblers were confusing_

Hilarious.

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kens
That page is a bit too much marketing fluff for my linking. A couple other
interesting pages on the 4004:

* An oral history from the developers [1]. One interesting part is that Intel procrastinates for months on developing the chip. Faggin gets hired to work on the chip, and Shima flies in from Japan the very next day to check on progress. He's very upset to find out that nothing has happened and starts yelling at Faggin, who just got there. They eventually work together to get the chip finished.

* Federico Faggin's website [2] with his perspective on the chip.

[1]
[http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Histo...](http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Intel_4004_2/102658187.05.01.acc.pdf)

[2] [http://www.intel4004.com/](http://www.intel4004.com/)

And I should mention that Texas Instruments built and announced the TMX-1795
microprocessor chip before the 4004. This chip's architecture and instruction
set was basically identical to the 8008 (since both were copies of the
Datapoint 2200). Texas Instruments patented the TMX-1795 (which was a hugely
valuable patent) and then abandoned the chip because it didn't work well.

~~~
chiph
I'm almost through with reading Walter Isaacson's _The Innovators_ and he
covers the patent issue - Intel and TI both recognized that their respective
innovations were essentially simultaneous, and decided to cross-license each
other's patents. And then remarkably, opened up licensing to other firms for a
nominal fee. Without this, the industry could not have grown as fast as it
did.

------
davidw
Missing from that page:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin)

------
ghshephard
A better page (Ironically?) is:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_4004](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_4004)

~~~
cbd1984
Not ironically, necessarily, because there is no reason the Wikipedia page
_should_ be worse for this topic. It is both technical and attracts
controversy (of the "No, _my_ system was the first single-chip CPU!" variety,
especially from partisans of systems with multiple-chip CPUs...) so it's kept
at a high quality, to disprove the partisans and to undo vandalism.

Morgellons is another example of this in action: The majority of the world
doesn't distinguish it from delusional parasitosis (when people think they
have bugs on them, but really don't) but there's a full-blown full-color
bells-and-whistles Conspiracy Theory surrounding the topic, so the editors
have to be on their toes citing to good sources to keep the nuts from scoring
points in the talk pages (which are entertaining to read).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgellons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgellons)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Morgellons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Morgellons)

~~~
DanBC
"The nuts"?

~~~
cbd1984
> "The nuts"?

The people who believe the Conspiracy Theories, which is a group orthogonal to
the people who actually have delusional parasitosis. Thinking you have bugs on
you doesn't make you nuts; thinking you have artificial fibers growing out of
your skin doesn't make you nuts; however, thinking it's due to chemicals being
sprayed by jets under the control of the NWO Zionist Illuminati cabal _is_
nuts.

------
agumonkey
Looking at intel history it's funny how the iAPX 432 was huge technologically
but failed to the interim 8086 which invaded the market with pragmatism,
similar to Apple's Lisa and Macintosh.

~~~
Narishma
Regardless of how huge technologically it was, whatever that means, it failed
because it was slower and more expensive than contemporary x86 processors.

