Word: microprocessor
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American firms are still far ahead in sales of microprocessors, chips that can perform computations and manipulate information, rather than just store it. In this market, the showdown is between Intel and Motorola. Intel may pull away be cause of its new alliance with IBM, the world's largest computer manufacturer. Last December, IBM bought 12% of Intel for $250 million, and this summer it increased its share to 13.7%. When IBM designed its immensely popular personal computer, the company chose an Intel microprocessor to be the heart of the machine. Because many companies are coming out with personal...
Another challenge came from California's Silicon Valley, where the microprocessor, or computer-on-a-chip, was developed. The tiny devices packed thousands of circuits onto a postage-stamp-size silicon chip and gave rise to the microcomputer. Apple recognized the potentially vast appeal of personal computing, and its sales jumped from less than $1 million to $582 million between...
Priced at $9,995, the machine packs into a boxy, 50-lb. package most of the hardware advances of the past five years: a system that will store nearly 7 million words; a sophisticated "32-bit" microprocessor that is far more powerful than the eight-bit chip in its predecessor, the Apple II; and an ultrasharp video display that can show twice as much detail as a standard computer screen. But the key breakthrough is embodied in Lisa's software, the computer codes that make the machine much easier to operate than any other desktop computer. The operator simply...
...drawback. With the circuits rigidly fixed in the silicon, the chips performed only the duties for which they were designed. They were "hardwired," as engineers say. That changed dramatically in 1971, when Intel Corp., a Silicon Valley company founded by Noyce after yet another "defection," unveiled the microprocessor. Designed by a young Intel engineer named Ted Hoff, it contained the entire central processing unit (CPU) of a simple computer on one chip. It was Babbage's mighty mill in microcosm...
...With the microprocessor, a single chip could be programmed to do any number of tasks, from running a watch to steering a spacecraft. It could also serve as the soul of a new machine: the personal computer. By 1975 the first of the new breed of computers had appeared, a hobbyist machine called the Altair 8800 (cost: $395 in kit form, $621 assembled). The Altair soon vanished from the marketplace. But already there were other young and imaginative tinkerers out in Silicon Valley getting ready to produce personal computers, including one bearing an odd symbol: an apple with a bite...