Hacker News Comments on
Intel 4004 Microprocessor 35th Anniversary
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.Another fantastic post! Just one minor point for anyone just browsing the title - bootstrap loads were of course also used in 4004 which preceded the 8008.Bootstrap loads get a mention in Federico Faggin's presentation on the 4004 at the 35th anniversary CHM presentation - it's a really interesting and engaging talk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j00AULJLCNo&t=26m0s
I think it's reasonably clear without bootstrap loads and the other innovations that Dr Faggin pioneered then Intel wouldn't have had the early lead in the microprocessor market which they were able ultimately to convert in a dominant position with x86.
⬐ ncmncmI found one surprise after another inhttps://ethw.org/Oral-History:Federico_Faggin
That Intel had to be physically dragged into microprocessors was a revelation. If they had not had this side-project 8080 that they considered absolutely uninteresting, when the memory business collapsed, there would be no Intel, and Andy Grove would not have become a big cheese.
Also, that self-aligned gates, depletion loads, the 8008 and 8080 were all Faggin's projects.
It is an enduring mystery why the 8080 was designed into so many systems. It was such a bad component: it couldn't do anything without a bunch of other support chips from Intel. And the ISA was so bad: half the instructions in a program were just to correct for the other instructions that didn't do the right thing.
People insisted it was great that it had these support chips, that you didn't even need for other CPUs. I thought it was because Intel had sharper sales people, but apparently not. So it remains a mystery.
⬐ klelattiGrove's infamous 'sign-in' sheet was one of the reasons that Faggin left Intel (after which they wrote him out of the story in official publications - Ted Hoff became the sole 'inventor' of the microprocessor) and of course the Z80 became much much more successful than the 8080 or 8085. Intel got very lucky with the 8088 and the IBM PC especially given the disaster that was the iAPX432.In case you haven't seen it this looks like a very interesting interview with FF from 1995 - not watched it all yet but some interesting comments on the 8080.
https://exhibits.stanford.edu/silicongenesis/catalog/gr768wf...
⬐ ncmncmI had no idea he was behind Synaptics, or that Synaptics was using Mead's analog computation architecture in 1995.
In the 35th anniversary talk on the 4004 at the Computer History Museum in 2006, Ted Hoff mentioned that one of the applications of the 4004 was for computerized cow collars for tracking feed and water ingestion:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j00AULJLCNo
So this is one of the first uses of a microprocessor. To paraphrase Jaron Lanier, calling tracking collars "smart" is an insult to human intelligence.