It is interesting that so much of history isn't what we think it is. For example, who broke the sound barrier first? Of course, it was Chuck Yeager in Glamorous Glennis, the rocket powered Bell X-1 named after his wife. Or was it?
The book "Aces Wild" [1] says that it was unofficially broken before that in an XP-86 (The experimental F-86, a jet powered fighter) in a dive, and witnesses on the ground heard sonic booms before Yeager's flight that day. But history favors the hero's, and in this case, the science: We know 100% for sure, because of science, that Yeager officially broke the sound barrier first.
It is quite possible that the F-86 test pilots who stuck their planes in a dive likely did it first. It is well documented that the F-86 was capable of Mach 1 in a dive. Even so, that's not what the history books say, so that's not what we teach kids in school. I suspect it'll always be the same with the F14 computer vs the Intel 4004.
There were many cases of pilots breaking the sound barrier in a dive prior to the X-1, even during World War II, and even some of them living to tell the tale. That was never in dispute.
The point of the X-1 has always been that it was the first human piloted plane that broke the sound barrier in level, controlled, and repeatable flight.
>There were many cases of pilots breaking the sound barrier in a dive prior to the X-1, even during World War II,
Aerospace engineer and amateur WWII historian here: I'm not aware of any credible claims from that era. The only WWII-era claims to have broken the sound barrier (by piloted craft) I've seen can be attributed to poor pitot tube design which gives erroneously high indicated airspeed readings when the ram pressure gets high enough.
A reconnaissance Spitfire I believe is what got closest, at something like .9 of Mach measured by a fancy pitot system at the RAF test establishment.
It basically boils down to the fact that machmeters hadn't been invented yet, because the physics of supersonic flight wasn't sufficiently understood back then.
Shock waves develop inside the pitot tube under certain conditions, and that causes a spike (or sometimes a drop) in pressure which is interpreted by the instrument as a corresponding rise or drop in airspeed.
Edit: as for the 262 claim itself it was pretty handily debunked in a post-war NACA technical note. If you dig around on the NTRS you can find it.
From Wikipedia: " Compressibility in pitot tubes of the time often resulted in exaggerated speed readings near the speed of sound, particularly in German equipment, which was adversely affected by supply shortages as the war progressed"
As usual, the Germans were first, with the V-2 reaching Mach 5 in the 1940's, which was to an extent controllable (they landed in England.)
For an airplane to reach Mach 1, this mainly requires thin wings and enough power/dive. To control it, you need a flying tail, and swept wings and "waisting" the fuselage reduces the amount of power needed.
So almost all of the planes in WW2 were "too thick" and incapable of supersonic flight, though could have exceeded Mach 1 with modified wings, tail and in a dive.
The US P-80 (1945) and F-86 (1949) jets had underpowered engines, in the sense that all early jet engines had limited power.
However the F-86 had swept wings, and later versions of the F-86 had a flying tail, so if you pointed it at the ground, you could get a sonic boom without losing control.
The X-1 could break the sound barrier in level flight. That is to say, it could move across geography, in a measurable way, faster than the speed of sound.
Creating a sonic boom in a deep and dangerous dive is an interesting quirk in a fighter, but it doesn’t set new speed records that would interest the general population.
This is a super cool, and very personal, story about a massive advance in VLSI avionics. Compare it to the System 4pi, or the value-based avionics of the Soviets. There were lots of other approaches, and this one was more sophisticated and yet less expensive. It’s a great achievement!
However, it is not, in any way, a story about a microprocessor.
The only interesting thing about the Intel 4004 is that it fit general purpose computing into a single chip package. Many people and companies did interesting things long before the 4004 with a relatively small number of components, but that number was not one.
The simple existence of a chip like the 4004, as a commercial product, altered an entire industry, globally. It gave rise to the Intel 8000 series, the Motorola 6800 series, and hundreds of clones.
Ultimately, the revolution kicked off by the microprocessor gave us microcomputers, the rise of CMOS, and, essentially, the end of all other architectures for computing.
This story is super cool but some editor fucked up real bad with the headline. This wonderful early application of VLSI and software in avionics is amazing, but it isn’t connected to the story of the “microprocessor,” as a thing.
P.S. even if you accept the premise that an ALU on a chip is a cool advance, it didn’t go anywhere! No one could buy the damn chip. Nothing ever came of it outside avionics contractors.
The personal side of this story is quite touching too. Two brothers, Bill and Ray, develop a microprocessor together. One brother Bill, dies. The remaining brother and those who formed the wedding party are the pallbearers at Bill's funeral. Bill's wife remarries, giving birth to the author. an amazing story and so personally written.
The US refused to export the TomCat to any other country and they destroyed all remaining TomCats after retiring them to prevent Iran from accessing spare parts, vs just having them parked in bone yards like other fighter jets.
There's one in Titusville, FL, at the Warbird Air Museum[0] just a few miles from Kennedy Space Center. Well worth a visit for the F-14 alone, it's an awesome sight, but they've also got loads of other great aircraft and knowledgeable staff to help provide insight.
If you're a flight and space geek like me, you'll spend a day or two at KSC and then a full day at the warbird museum. Whenever I find myself in Florida I try to make my way out there, can't recommend it enough!
Ray Holt also went on to design the Jolt computer, a very early 6502 based computer which lead to the SYM-1 (also designed by Ray Holt), and TIM-1, which was more of a kit with a pre-programmed ROM. I built my own TIM-1 this year and have been doing a bit of research into these early 6502 boards. The Jolt computer is perhaps most famous for being used as the microprocessor section in the first Atari 2600 prototypes.
The processor itself is the chip that has the ALU, since that's what really does the processing. The registers may be on-die with the ALU, or may be in another chip for various reasons, but the ALU would have a bad time without registers, so they're always used together.
Likewise there's usually an interrupt controller of some sort, and a timer, and technically a processor can process without these, but it's not terribly useful in the real world. But because an interrupt controller in particular tends to have quite a few I/O pins, it's often in a separate package from the ALU, and you can pick larger or smaller interrupt controllers (or chain several together) depending on the application. But these are typically designed as a "family", and are always found together.
Atop all that, you generally need some ROM to boot the thing, and probably some glue logic (muxes and decoders) to perform memory mapping, etc. And then main system RAM itself. These are generic enough that they may or may not be considered part of the "family" with the processor.
Previously, the ALU would've been an entire board full of SSI chips, or a whole shelf of modules stuffed with individual discretes. And the register file would be another board, or a shelf thereof. And interrupts and glue would be all over the place, and peripherals getting into the mix... None of those boards was useful without the others, so they were always found together. Putting each of those functions onto a single chip instead of a whole board is what made it "micro", even if it was always found with the rest of its family.
Today, we have a term "microcontroller", for something that integrates the whole shebang: ALU, registers, RAM, ROM, interrupt controller, clock and timer, and I/O peripherals, into a single chip. It does processing, so you could consider it a microprocessor, but it has basically the whole rest of everything in there too (everything but power, typically). The term "microprocessor" does not go as far.
It's funny when people say things like capitalism created computers and iPhones. No it was the government, primarily the military for decades right up to when they could be marketed, that was the leading researcher in this field.
Pity this was kept secret and only ever saw military use. Sounds like a very advanced processor.
The government (usually the military) makes the thing with a basically unlimited space and budget, the private sector let's you buy one. Making an iPhone is not trivial in the slightest, too.
Also, the military (for the most part) pays for these inventions, the actual research and manufacture is usually still done in the private sector. That doesn't have to be the case, but if we take the Soviet Union as an example of an alternate system (Basically state-owned design Bureaus) they could just about keep up with the pace of technological development (and match in limited scope) but their populaces didn't see the "trickle down" technology.
I once read the big problem with Soviet industry was they focused on heavy industry but not light manufacturing like Co sumer products. The Asian tigers explicitly focused on that.
Instead of state we have state based capitalism. Instead of innovation by state, we have private firms which can steal from other countries freely as they are not military. And they can produce well as well. And they can go out to sell you things and selective let you in for helping in the copying.
The cold war was the father and mother of the computing industry and science. Most of innovative super computers were designed and sold for the Nuclear Weapons Labs or the Lockheeds of the time.
Heatblur's brilliant simulation of the F-14 for DCS World is currently free for the next week or so, worth having a play if you own a flightstick - the level of detail is unbelievable.
I have a walk in closet I used to store work equipment in. I turned all that back in last week so it's getting turned into my flight sim room next week.
Now I'm curious. How does DCS handle IFF? Does it just abstract it to some general concept of IFF, or do you actually have to deal with the various modes and such? How does it handle different incompatible countries/generations of IFF?
In short, increasingly well modelled but ultimately only an abstraction due to some fairly obvious reasons. The JF-17 apparently has the best IFF model in the game but I only started flying it yesterday.
When I was in VF-302 sometimes a reward for enlisted guys who did really well was a little simulator time. They all said just maintaining flight was very difficult and the minute adversaries were added, they were dead.
When something happened sometimes it happened everywhere around the sane time. It would be odd to have one singularity. But 4004 ... now we know it is not.
The book "Aces Wild" [1] says that it was unofficially broken before that in an XP-86 (The experimental F-86, a jet powered fighter) in a dive, and witnesses on the ground heard sonic booms before Yeager's flight that day. But history favors the hero's, and in this case, the science: We know 100% for sure, because of science, that Yeager officially broke the sound barrier first.
It is quite possible that the F-86 test pilots who stuck their planes in a dive likely did it first. It is well documented that the F-86 was capable of Mach 1 in a dive. Even so, that's not what the history books say, so that's not what we teach kids in school. I suspect it'll always be the same with the F14 computer vs the Intel 4004.
[1] https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/mach-1-whoduni...