13 Oct
2007
13 Oct
'07
2:14 a.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 12 Oct 2007 at 23:02, Brent Hilpert wrote:
(For the article I saw I think it was Electronics or Electronics World. I was
sorting mags at the radio museum and had my eye out for articles relating to
digital stuff. I don't think it was a computer mag per se, unless I ran
across an oddball. Unfortunately I didn't make a ref note for it as I did for
a lot of other articles and have to go back and scan thru sometime.)
So much of the commonly told history makes the dev of the microproc into such
a momentous issue, I'd like to have some real stuff around to point to show
the contrary, or put it in context of the times.
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.).
Check old Datamation and Computerweek issues; I used to read those
religiously and that may be where I saw it. Could also have been in
an IEEE publication. That was the definitely the buzz in 1969-70; I
remember commenting to
an EE prof at a local university that the single-chip monolithic CPU
was just on the horizon. His reaction was one who was being told
that blue M&Ms were just on the horizon. He just didn't get it.
When I left CDC for the grand world of microprocessors, Neil Lincoln
(the architect of the not-yet-envisioned ETA-10) had me flown to
Arden Hills to talk some sense into me. After spending most of a day
tagging around with him being shown the great projects on the drawing
board, he sat down and said: "So you're leaving supercomputers for
MICROCOMPUTERS? Really?" I told him that I'd seen the future and he
confessed that he'd just bought a Commodore Pet. I told him that I'd
had an MITS Altair since 1975.
Viewed from the outside, leaving a company like CDC at that time would seem
like a difficult decision, being on the inside perhaps you could see
better where they were headed.
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.