13 Oct
2007
13 Oct
'07
9:26 a.m.
On 13 Oct 2007 at 7:46, dwight elvey wrote:
This was what Federico Faggin had stated at a talk he
gave at the CHM.
Packaging was expensive and they'd made volume deals on 16 pin
packages.
That's interesting, particularly considering the competition at the
time, the Rockwell PPS-4 in the funny quad-row package.
We need to be fair, though--none of these (4004, 8008, PPS-4) were
single-chip microprocessors--they all required additional support
logic chips that, it could be argued, were just as much a part of the
microprocessor as what was in the main package. The act of moving
the control and sequencing into the same package as the ALU doesn't
seem like that much of a leap in retrospect. I've even seen the
National IMP-16 referred to as a microprocessor in some documents;
that was definitely a multi-chip configuration. Something you could
simply connect a crystal and some RAM to was still in the future.
On 13 Oct 2007 at 2:14, Brent Hilpert wrote:
This also goes back to mention of the Osborne book
last week, the first
microprocs really being targetted at embedded systems/logic replacement, it
was just those silly hobbyists trying to make general purpose computing
systems out of them. It would seem that some saw beyond that, some didn't.
One of the more humiliating memories of mine was stopping by my
apartment with a (female) co-worker and showing her my just-assembled
new pride and joy; the MITS Altair. This would have been 1975. Her
response was something to the effect of "I thought you told me you
had a computer. THAT'S not a computer; that's a toy with blinking
lights. You paid a thousand dollars for THAT?"
What is it that H.L. Mencken said? "How little it takes to make life
unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a
woman's laugh." I was mortified.
Cheers,
Chuck