Word: hoff
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...much of his career Tom Conti has been called the British Dustin Hoffman. He looks so much like Hoff man that he once fooled even himself. "I did a film a couple of years ago," he says, "and there was a bit in which I was lying upside down, unconscious in a sailboat. The shot came up later on when I was watching the rushes and I thought. 'God! That's Dustin Hoffman!' " Conti also finds himself in odd positions in Whose Life Is It Any way?, but not for a second does the audience doubt whom it is seeing...
...young electronics engineer at the newly formed Intel Corp., it was a challenging assignment. Fresh out of Stanford University, where he had been a research as sociate, M.E. ("Ted") Hoff in 1969 was placed in charge of producing a set of miniature components for programmable desk top calculators that a Japanese firm planned to market. After studying the circuitry proposed by the Japanese designers, the shy, self-effacing Hoff knew that he had a problem. As he recalls: "The calculators required a large number of chips, all of them quite expensive, and it looked, quite frankly, as if it would...
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...
...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 on a chip...
...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...