Word: chips
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Pondering the difficulty, Hoff was suddenly struck by a novel idea. Why not place most of the calculator's arithmetic and logic circuitry on one chip of silicon, leaving mainly input-output and programming units on separate chips? It was a daring conceptual move. After wrestling with the design, Hoff and his associates at Intel finally concentrated nearly all the elements of a central processing unit (CPU), the computer's electronic heart and soul, on a single silicon chip...
Unveiled in 1971, the one-chip CPU - or microprocessor - contained 2,250 transistors in an area barely a sixth of an inch long and an eighth of an inch wide. In computational power, the micro processor almost matched the monstrous ENIAC - the first fully electronic computer, completed in 1946 - and performed as well as an early 1960s IBM machine that cost $30,000 and required a CPU that alone was the size of a large desk. On his office wall, Hoff still displays Intel's original advertisement: "Announcing a new era of integrated electronics ... a microprogrammable computer...
Intel's little chip had repercussions far beyond the pocket-calculator and minicomputer field. It was so small and cheap that it could be easily incorporated into almost any device that might benefit from some "thinking" power: electric typewriters with a memory, cameras, elevator controls, a shopkeeper's scales, vending machines, and a huge variety of household appliances. The new chip also represented another kind of breakthrough: because its program was on a different chip, the microprocessor could be "taught" to do any number of chores. All that had to be done was to substitute a tiny program...
...Intel chip and one developed at about the same time at Texas Instruments-the question of priority is still widely debated in the industry-were the natural culmination of a revolution in electronics that began in 1948 with Bell Telephone Laboratories' announcement of the transistor. Small, extremely reliable, and capable of operating with only a fraction of the electricity needed by the vacuum tube, the "solid-state" device proved ideal for making not only inexpensive portable radios and tape recorders but computers as well. Indeed, without the transistor, the computer might never have advanced much beyond the bulky...
...LSls had an innate drawback. Because they were made in rigid patterns and served only particular purposes -or were, as engineers say, "hard-wired"-they lacked flexibility. That limitation was ingeniously solved by the work of Hoff and others on microprogramming-storing control instructions on a memory-like chip. For the first time, computer designers could produce circuitry usable for any number of purposes. In theory, the same basic chip could do everything from guiding a missile to switching on a roast...