22 Nov
2023
22 Nov
'23
12:33 a.m.
On Nov 21, 2023, at 7:13 PM, Antonio Carlini via
cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 21/11/2023 23:14, Will Cooke via cctalk wrote:
Remember the guy at the British spook agency (GCHQ?) who said he invented RSA a long time
before Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman did? Perhaps so, but the fact that it was all secret
means it didn't matter to the real world.
This sort of thing happens a lot, in inventions or discoveries. There were types of
telegraphs before S.F.B. Morse came along, but his design took over the world. There were
Europeans who traveled to America before Columbus, but nothing came of those explorations
and they were pretty much forgotten. And FM radio was first invented in 1919 by a Dutch
engineer (Hanso Idzerda), not around 1930 by Edwin Armstrong -- but Idzerda's design
was a technological dead end and disappeared from view by the late 1920s, while
Armstrong's design became universal and remains so.
So I tend to qualify "first to invent" (or "discover") as "first
to invent and make it matter".
paul
More information is here:
https://firstmicroprocessor.com/?doing_wp_cron=1700608229.86660599708557128…
I think that is the designers (Rod Holt?) website. Apparently he won a legal battle to
use the term "first microprocessor" for whatever that is worth.
Details were published in 1998 and the chip was available approximately never (I presume,
unless you were building a Tomcat) so I'm not sure you should count it. Perhaps
"first microprocessor, until someone else claims another secret design that was even
earlier" would be a more accurate claim?