| MARKS OF ESTEEM
History
of the Microcomputer Revolution
The
Revolution Begins
Computers
began to get smaller in the 1960's with the introduction of
Digital Equipment Corporation's Minicomputers. These DEC minicomputers
went on to play an interesting part in the Microcomputer Revolution
and I'll tell you about that later, but minicomputers were
still designed for businesses, not people.
Advances
in electronics brought about the microcomputer revolution.
The room-sized first mainframe computer - the ENIAC - was
replaced by the technology of the transistor, invented by
engineers working at Bell Laboratories in the early 1950's.
William Shockley is credited as the co-inventor of the transistor,
and he left Bell in 1956 to form his own company, Shockley
Semiconductor Laboratories, in what was to become California's
Silicon Valley.
One
of the engineers working for him in his new company was a
young man named Robert Noyce, a talented individual from a
small town in Iowa. Noyce and several other engineers soon
left Shockley to form a new company, Fairchild Electronics,
financed by a venture capitalist. While working at Fairchild,
Noyce came up with the idea for the integrated circuit around
1959, and is credited as its inventor. He worked
his way to become manager of the Fairchild operation, but
he longed to own and operate his own company.
In
1968 Noyce and another engineer, Gordon Moore, left
Fairchild to start their own electronics firm, which
they named the Intel Corporation. The company
started with 12 employees and their first year revenues were
$ 2,672.00. Now, over a quarter century later, Intel's innovations
have changed the world.
Intel
focused initially on making semiconductor computer memory
- practical and affordable. Within a year, Intel had rolled
out its first product - the 3101 64-bit memory chip. Intel
continued to successfully develop memory chips, but in 1971
the event happened which changed the world and launched the
microcomputer revolution.
A
Japanese calculator company named Busicom had approached
Intel back in 1969 about designing a set of chips
for a programmable calculator and had advanced Intel $ 60,000.
Their original design had called for multiple custom chips,
but Ted Hoff, a young Intel engineer, thought it was too complex.
His solution was to develop a single-chip, general purpose
logic device which would retrieve its instructions from semiconductor
memory. He envisioned this solution to enable an off-the-shelf
processor to handle many different functions, and eliminate
a lot of custom circuit design.
Hoff's
vision was transformed into silicon by a team of engineers
and designers, and within several months the Intel
4004 microprocessor was created. 1/8"wide and
1/6"long, and consisting of 2300 transistors, this revolutionary
computer on a tiny chip had as much computing power as its
ancient great-grandfather, the room-sized ENIAC. Intel decided
to buy the rights to this product back from the Japanese company,
which had run into financial problems - and the rest - as
they say - is history.
The
Intel 4004 was introduced by the end of 1971, sold for $ 200,
and was followed less than a year later by the 8008, an 8-bit
microprocessor which sold for $ 360. For the first time, affordable
computer power was available to everyone.
Next
week we'll learn how the Intel 8008 caught the attention of
a couple Seattle high school kids, and how they fit into the
microcomputer revolution.
History
of the Microcomputer Revolution
The Historic Background
The
Revolution Begins
The
Washington State Connection
High
School Kid's Computer Company
The
World's First Commercially Available PC
What
good is a computer without Software?
Send
in the Clones
The
First Operating System Standard
Home
Brewing and Computers Named Apple
The
Killer Application
IBM's
Secret
The
Deal of The Century
A
Walk in the PARC
Send
in the Clones again - Freud would have said GUI-Envy
The
PC Industry at Age 11 in 1986
Will
the Circle Be Unbroken?
Bibliography
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