Was there ever a COMPUTER using a 4004 that you cud really do something or did
tat finally arrive with the 8008 as in the skelby shelby sp? 8008 i now there was an
Intel INTELIC 4 (?sp) could n that use 4004 or one of the later 4000 numbered
proc. We have an intelec 8 and 8 inch floppy drives here at smecc musem .... always
wanted a 4!Ed#
In a message dated 11/21/2023 11:31:55 AM US Mountain Standard Time, dkelvey(a)hotmail.com
writes:
There is little surviving software for the 4004. There are a few places with snippets of
code to do things like add or subtract several digits but my searches of the internet have
shown little actual code. The NBS has some code to track satellites and correct for time
delays from their clocks ( think GPS ).I'd had a spare 4004 and always wanted to do
something with it. I found that the library for work done at the Navy Post Graduate School
in Monterey California had 2 projects that students of Gary Kildall created. One was a
load calculator for helicopters and the other was for calculating closest point of
approach for ships. I'd been unsuccessful at down loading the helicopter code but was
able to down load the ships document.I'd let the listing sit for 10's of years
while always on the back burner. Over the years I'd acquired the needed parts. I did
make a few substitutions, though. The original used 13 each 1702A EPROMs. Since that
exceed my budget for a PC board space, I chose the option of using a 4289 and a 2732
EPROM. I did use the original designs number of 4002s, as using RAM through the 4289 would
have made significant changes to the software.The problem of the circuit needed to be
dealt with. The document had a page labelled 'schematic' that turned out to be the
keyboard layout and display layout( both of which I ignored and used my own layout that I
though was better ).Before getting to the board design, I needed to get working software.
The listing was done on a ASR33 with a deeply rutted platen, typical of hand-me-down
things used by a school's command. Letters like R or P would look like F and 0 would
look like C. Other letters were easy to figure out but still often had their right edge
missing.After entering the list by hand, I'd feed it into my assembler and the tried
to run it with my simulator.I'd make corrections as I got the code running.I need to
create the circuitry for the keyboard decoder, that took 25 buttons to the 4 bit data bus
input of the 4004. There was enough description in the document to create the LED display
but I did missed one thing ( that I'll mention later ).I created the board with my
typical incorrect wiring, requiring several extra cuts and jumpers. ( the concept was
right but I got the pins of the 7402 mixed up.) The one thing that I'd missed was the
order of the digit scan. I assumed left to right but the code was actually right to left.
After so many cuts and jumpers to get the keyboard right, I dreaded more to fix the scan
order so I made the one change to the original software to do right to left ( I still feel
bad about that change ).I thought I'd talk a little about how a Closest Point of
Approach Calculation is done. Normally it had been done by a graphical method of line
drawing on what is called a plotting maneuver board. One used graphical calculations for
the trig used. It was all done by pencil and parallel. It is so important that, I believe,
that to this day a ship's pilot still needs to be able to do this calculation on a
maneuver board, even though such graphical displays are capable of doing such, today.
Large ships require significant knowledge of where they are relative to other fixed and
moving objects in order to determine the safest path to proceed. A broken display is not
time to learn how to do such a calculation.This 4004 calculator used a newly found way of
doing tangent calculations, called the CORDIC method. One could clearly see the influence
of Gary Kildall's hand in this code. It is noted that he wrote the division routine
used and the organization of the code clearly shows the influence of a seasoned
programmer. Bring such code back to life was almost as much as making a 4004 processor
from discrete transistors but I felt was for me as part of my bucket list.Things I needed
to do, included writing an assembler, writing a simulator, learn a PC board CAD,
transcribing a poor quality listing, debugging the poorly transcribed listing, creating
the keyboard decoder and instrumenting my simulator to be the calculator.Dwight From: ED
SHARPE via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2023 1:03 AM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
Cc: ED SHARPE <couryhouse(a)aol.com>
Subject: [cctalk] Re: Intel 4004 So what are the other contenders and what do they bring
to table
Sent from AOL on Android
On Mon, Nov 20, 2023 at 9:06 PM, Adrian Stoness via cctalk<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote: someone should build it in minecrsft
On Mon, Nov 20, 2023 at 7:01 PM ben via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
On 2023-11-20 5:36 p.m., Murray McCullough via cctalk
wrote:
On Nov. 15, 1971 Intel commercially released the
4004 microprocessor
which
some consider to be the first. Nonetheless, even
if not in agreement, it
made possible the instrument which drives the classic-computing industry
or
at the very least our hobby!
Happy computing.
Murray 🙂
https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/swiss-physicist-builds-complete-intel-400…
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