[cctalk] Re: Intel 4004

cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote: https://firstmicroprocessor.com/?doing_wp_cron=1700608229.86660599708557128… legal battle to use the term "first microprocessor" for whatever that is worth. 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? 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