INTEL 4004

The late Steve Jobs once said, The most brilliant minds have made great innovations such as the telephone, the automobile, and other technologies, gadgets, and concepts that we have discussed here in Relic.

- Words by Jose Alvarez

But what about the smaller innovations that go unnoticed, yet paved the way for larger ones? The Intel 4004 microprocessor was one of those innovations. This allowed for computers to go from the size of an entire room to something you can easily carry around in your hand in only a few generations. What did the Intel 4004 do, and how are we seeing its impact today?

As previously mentioned, computers took up entire rooms in the 1950s. The start of the Intel 4004 came about as an innovation based on the design of a 1965 Italian-made calculator, the Olivetti Programma 101. This calculator was a desktop programmable calculator that weighed 35.5 kg (~78.3 lb), stored 240 bytes of memory, and had a 36-key keyboard. Busicom asked Intel to produce a 12-chip set to handle operations for an upcoming electronic calculator in 1969 that would use integrated circuits instead of printed circuit boards and use solid-state shift registers for memory. This would reduce the chip count using Intel’s medium-scale integration (MSI) technique.

Marcian Hoff (1937-), Intel’s 12th employee, was assigned to be the liaison between Busicom and Intel. Three Busicom employees, led by Masatoshi Shima (1943-) and two other colleagues named Masuda and Takayama, came to introduce the concept to Intel. Hoff also began to study the idea himself. The initial proposal came with seven integrated circuits (ICs): program control, arithmetic unit (ALU), timing, program read-only memory (ROM), shift registers for temporary memory, a printer controller, and input/output (I/O) control. However, Hoff saw that the number of chips and making connections between them would make Busicom’s price goals impossible to meet. He raised the issue with then-Intel CEO Bob Noyce (1927-1990), also known as the “Mayor of Silicon Valley”, who gave Hoff his support for an alternative, more feasible approach.