4004 and IC history / was Re: Vintage computer photogallery

dwight elvey wrote: (No doubt that core was important, just the way it was attributed in the photo blurb was misleading). I quite agree about the 4004. It may have been first, but it was one of those things whose time had come - it really wasn't that big a conceptual leap. Some time ago I ran across an editorial in a magazine ca. 1969 that basically summed up the problem: increasing logic density and hence IC complexity (LSI was on the horizon) would result in an explosion of chip designs that would be unmanageable (unique design per task,low production runs,etc.). The answer a year or two later would be the microproc (few chip designs, uniqueness in software in ROM). You could say FPGA/CPLDs are another, more recent, answer to that question. Now if only I could find that editorial. Based on what I've read though, I disagree about the (degree of) credit generally given to TI/Kilby regarding the creation of the IC, on similar grounds: in the late 50s there were lots of efforts/attempts/designs to create miniature modules of some sort. Kilby made the 'obvious' (like the microproc) development of not cutting the transistor dies apart from the wafer before interconnecting them and got to the patent office first on that issue. His techniques however, were frankly a bit of a hack that weren't going to go (scale up) anywhere. It was the development of the planar form of transistor by Hoerni, junction isolation by Lehovec and putting it all together with various layering techniques by Noyce at Fairchild that created and made feasible the IC as we still know it today. Can't testify to it's accuracy but one of my favorite quips about the 4004 is the reason it had that multiplexed 4-bit bus/machine cycle was to squish it into a 16-pin package because management didn't want to tool up for larger packages.