3 ms·

How did they figure out who would be their customers? To some extent they didn’t. They didn’t think anyone would want the 4004, 8008, 8080 for computers. They

How did they figure out who would be their customers? To some extent they didn’t. They didn’t think anyone would want the 4004, 8008, 8080 for computers. They started out marketing them for use in calculators. The personal computer market didn’t exist yet. PCs were originally built by hackers, many of whom belonged to the homebrew computer club. The first one to go into production was the MITS Altair 8800, which used an Intel 8080, but when you bought it you got a bunch of chips you had to solder onto the board yourself, so only hackers had any interest in it. If you’re really interested in this stuff, I highly recommend the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy [1]. The book traces the history of hackers from its beginnings at the tech model railroad club at MIT through the homebrew computer club at Stanford, and on into the beginnings of the computer game industry. It’s a fantastic chronicle of some very interesting and entertaining characters, with some real pranksters in the bunch. A very fun read! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute...

kps 6y ago
The 4004 was designed for calculators. The 8008 was for a terminal, the CTC Datapoint 2200, and Intel (and TI) implemented their instruction set… and that's why today x64 FLAGS has PF.
perl4ever 6y ago
>They didn’t think anyone would want the 4004, 8008, 8080 for computers. The Wikipedia page on the 8008 says Intel didn't want to make CPUs at first, even though people were interested, because their business was mostly memory chips and they didn't want to compete with clients. The 8008 was a commissioned project, and when the client decided to abandon it, they gave the IP to Intel in lieu of paying the bill. So Intel was like "what the heck, let's sell them at $120 apiece", in 1972. I'm not that familiar with the history, although I did read Hackers a long time ago, but it sounds like CTC[1] may have largely designed what because the 8008 and gave rise to the 8080 and x86. Just looking at the Wikipedia pages for the 4004 and 8008, it seems like the latter generally resembles x86 and the former does not, so perhaps the whole dynasty is not exactly based on an Intel foundation. Reminds me of the way Microsoft got going with OSes. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint
- kens 6y ago
  That's basically correct. The 8008 was a single-chip version of the TTL processor in the Datapoint 2200 desktop computer / terminal. It is entirely unrelated to the 4004 except that many of the same Intel people worked on it. In other words, the view that the 4004 led to the 8008 is entirely fictional. The Intel 8080 (used in the early Altair computer) was a slightly cleaned up version of the 8008, and the 8085 was a 5-volt version of the 8080. Intel's next processor was supposed to be the super-advanced 8800 with hardware support for objects and garbage collection. That chip fell behind schedule, so Intel threw together the 8086 as a stop-gap chip, a 16-bit processor somewhat compatible with the 8080. The 8800 was eventually released as the iAPX 432, which was a commercial failure but is definitely worth a look for its bizarre architecture -- a vision of what could have been. I've written a detailed history of early microprocessors here: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/the-surprising-story-of-the-first-microprocessors https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/th...

kps 6y ago

The 4004 was designed for calculators. The 8008 was for a terminal, the CTC Datapoint 2200, and Intel (and TI) implemented their instruction set… and that's why today x64 FLAGS has PF.

perl4ever 6y ago

>They didn’t think anyone would want the 4004, 8008, 8080 for computers. The Wikipedia page on the 8008 says Intel didn't want to make CPUs at first, even though people were interested, because their business was mostly memory chips and they didn't want to compete with clients. The 8008 was a commissioned project, and when the client decided to abandon it, they gave the IP to Intel in lieu of paying the bill. So Intel was like "what the heck, let's sell them at $120 apiece", in 1972. I'm not that familiar with the history, although I did read Hackers a long time ago, but it sounds like CTC[1] may have largely designed what because the 8008 and gave rise to the 8080 and x86. Just looking at the Wikipedia pages for the 4004 and 8008, it seems like the latter generally resembles x86 and the former does not, so perhaps the whole dynasty is not exactly based on an Intel foundation. Reminds me of the way Microsoft got going with OSes. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint

kens 6y ago
That's basically correct. The 8008 was a single-chip version of the TTL processor in the Datapoint 2200 desktop computer / terminal. It is entirely unrelated to the 4004 except that many of the same Intel people worked on it. In other words, the view that the 4004 led to the 8008 is entirely fictional. The Intel 8080 (used in the early Altair computer) was a slightly cleaned up version of the 8008, and the 8085 was a 5-volt version of the 8080. Intel's next processor was supposed to be the super-advanced 8800 with hardware support for objects and garbage collection. That chip fell behind schedule, so Intel threw together the 8086 as a stop-gap chip, a 16-bit processor somewhat compatible with the 8080. The 8800 was eventually released as the iAPX 432, which was a commercial failure but is definitely worth a look for its bizarre architecture -- a vision of what could have been. I've written a detailed history of early microprocessors here: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/the-surprising-story-of-the-first-microprocessors https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/th...