Pioneers of computing

[Brent Hilpert]

On 2019-Mar-10, at 3:59 PM, Will Cooke via cctalk wrote:
>> On 3/10/2019 3:18 PM, Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote:
>>> Back in 1965 Jack Kilby, Jerry Merryman and James Van Tassel at texas
>>> Instruments created an integrated circuit designed to replace the
>>> calulator. Historians, though not all, credit this development as the
>>> beginning of the electronic-computing revolution that was truly underway by
>>> the mid-70s. Vintage/classic computing our hobby goes back that far as us
>>> baby-boomers can attest to.
. . .
> Here is a little bit of info on it:
> http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/ti_cal-tech1.html


On 2019-Mar-10, at 10:48 PM, ben via cctalk wrote:
> On 3/10/2019 7:30 PM, Guy Dunphy via cctalk wrote:
> 
>>> Here is a little bit of info on it:
>>> http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/ti_cal-tech1.html
>> That's fascinating, thanks. I'd never heard of it.
>> The Intel 4004 came out in 1971.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_4004
>> I'd understood that was the first chip that could be considered a 'processor' (though it required some support chips to do anything.)
>> The TI Cal-Tech design was begun in 1965 and they had a working calculator in 1967. I wonder if the chips in that had any kind of code programmability?

> Looking at the vintage calculator page, I would give the "FAR EAST" my vote for the first processor type chips. Everything was in-house development you can say they all came out at the same time. Look at TTL
> pre 1970 4 gate logic, after 1970 74181 alu 7416x 4 bit counters 7489 16x4 RAM. About 1973 Tristate logic and 32x8 , 256x4 PROMS.


If you read the link provided by Will, the Cal-tech was four ICs, not one.
It was a forward-thinking lab R&D project which you would expect to be ahead of the IC technology on the market.

It would be several more years, ca. 1971 before the complete logic for a calculator was stuffed onto one chip and available on the market,
so coincident in time with the 4004.
There was the TMS-0100 series from TI , single-chip calculators, 1971.
	https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/ti/tms0100

TI and others did produce some calculator chip-sets (calc on several dedicated LSI chips) for the market prior to the single-chip implementations.

No, the first 'processor-type' chips didn't come out of the 'far east'.
The Japanese were producing calculators with hard-wired / random logic / dedicated state-machine architectures in the late 60s.
With the advent of LSI, they came to the Americans to get chips designed, resulting in one case in the 4004.

See also the TMS1795 (1971) and TMS1000 (1974).
Rockwell was another of the big players.