First Electronic Handheld Calculator - The electronic hand ...



First Electronic Handheld Calculator - The electronic hand-held calculator was invented at Texas Instruments in 1967 by Jack Kilby, Jerry Merryman, and James Van Tassel. Measuring 4-1/4 x 6-1/8 x 1-3/4-inches, it was the first mini-calculator to have the high degree of computational power found only at the time in considerably larger machines.

DEC unveils the PDP-8, the first commercially successful minicomputer. Small enough to sit on a desktop, it sells for $18,000 — one-fifth the cost of a low-end IBM/360 mainframe. The combination of speed, size, and cost enables the establishment of the minicomputer in thousands of manufacturing plants, offices, and scientific laboratories

Steve Wozniak begins his career by building one of the best-known ‘blue boxes;’ tone generators that enable long-distance dialing while bypassing the phone company’s billing equipment.

In 1971, Intel released the first microprocessor. The microprocessor was a specialized integrated circuit which was able to process four bits of data at a time. The chip included its own arithmetic logic unit, but a sizable portion of the chip was taken up by the control circuits for organizing the work, which left less room for the data-handling circuitry. Thousands of hackers could now aspire to own their own personal computer. Computers up to this point had been strictly the legion of the military, universities, and very large corporations simply because of their enormous cost for the machine and then maintenance. In 1975, the cover of Popular Electronics featured a story on the "world's first minicomputer kit to rival commercial models....Altair 8800." The Altair, produced by a company called Micro Instrumentation and Telementry Systems (MITS) retailed for $397, which made it easily affordable for the small but growing hacker community.

The Altair was not designed for your computer novice. The kit required assembly by the owner and then it was necessary to write software for the machine since none was yet commercially available. The Altair had a 256 byte memory--about the size of a paragraph, and needed to be coded in machine code- -0s and 1s. The programming was accomplished by manually flipping switches located on the front of the Altair. The 4004, the world's first microprocessor, is signed with the initials F.F., for Federico Faggin, its designer. Signing the chip was a spontaneous gesture of proud authorship. It was also an original idea, imitated after him by others. Faggin initially etched the F.F. inside the design. Later he moved them to its border, like the autograph on a work of art. The signature is a particularly poignant testimony because, at the time of its birth, the first microprocessor, far from being considered a milestone by Intel's management, represented a diversion from the mainline business of the company which was memory chips.

The birth of the 4004 was an intense moment witnessed by Faggin alone, working into the night in the deserted Intel labs. He had received the 4004 wafers from the manufacturing line at around 6 PM, in January 1971, as people were leaving for the day. With hands trembling and heart pounding he loaded the wafers in the wafer prober and connected it to the tester. A sigh of relief raised from his chest, above the humming of the instruments, as he observed electrical activity in the device. As the testing progressed, the tension was gradually transforming into elation as all the critical functions showed to be operating properly. At around 3 AM, exhausted and ecstatic, Faggin left the lab. At home his wife, Elvia, was waiting for the news. "It works"! he announced, and they shared the happiness in this moment of triumph.

Federico Faggin signed the 4004 because:

He was the leader of the design/development project of the first microprocessor, and brought it to its successful conclusion.

Faggin did the detailed design work (logic design, circuit design, chip layout, tester design and test program development) with help from Masatoshi Shima, a Busicom engineer.

Busicom presented to Faggin the engineering prototype of their calculator with the first 4004. Faggin in 1996 donated it to the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

He was the original developer of the Silicon Gate Technology, the first commercial self-aligned gate process, and the designer of the world's first commercial integrated circuit using the silicon gate technology: the Fairchild 3708. This semiconductor technology was copied by Intel and made into its core manufacturing technology, enabling the early realization of high-performance memories and the microprocessor.

Faggin made two other key inventions at Fairchild: the Buried Contact and the Bootstrap Load. At Intel he applied these innovations to build the first microprocessor. They were essential in making the 4004 a reality with the technology available in 1970. Faggin also created the basic Methodology of Random Logic Design using silicon gate technology. This methodology did not exist at Intel or anywhere else until he developed it in 1970. It set the style of design used for all early generations of microprocessors at Intel.

He demostrated that the 4004 could be used for applications other than calculators and vigorously campaigned inside Intel to make the 4004 available to the general market.

Two patents cover Intel's first microprocessor: patent no. 3,821,715, Memory System for a Multi-Chip Digital Computer, in the names of Ted Hoff, Stan Mazor and Federico Faggin; and patent no. 3,753,011, power supply settable, bi-stable circuit, in the name of Federico Faggin.

Faggin left Intel in 1974, to start Zilog, a company dedicated to the emerging microprocessor market and a direct competitor of Intel. After having led from the beginning all of Intel's microprocessor development activity, at the time of his leaving Faggin was heading all of the MOS chip design activity, with the exception of dynamic memories. Intel’s management punished Faggin by disowning him of his many contributions, attributing most of his credits in the creation of the microprocessor to Ted Hoff, and by encouraging lesser contributors to grab a bigger share and play a bigger role than they did to dim

Zilog In October 1974, Faggin left Intel to start his first company, Zilog, Inc. He was joined by Ralph Ungerman, who reported to him at Intel. Faggin conceived and architected the Z80 CPU and the Z80 family of peripheral components. Masatoshi Shima joined Zilog in April 1975 to do the detailed design of the Z80 CPU. The Z80 was introduced in the market in May 1976 and became very successful, supplanting the older generation 8080 in many designs. Faggin was President and CEO of Zilog from inception until December 1980. The reasons that prompted him to leave Intel were many. The most compelling was discovering that Intel had patented his "buried contact" idea, without his knowledge, under the name of Leslie Vadasz, his former boss at Fairchild and now at Intel.

In 1965, Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, first forecasted that computer chip complexity would double every 18 months, with each new chip containing roughly twice as many transistors as its predecessor, thereby producing an exponential rise in computing power.

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Figure 1.1 Moore's Law

Moore's observation, now known as Moore's Law, described a trend that has continued and is still remarkably accurate. (1) It is the basis for many planners' performance forecasts. In 26 years the number of transistors on a chip has increased more than 3,200 times, from 2,300 on the INTEL 4004 in 1971 to 7.5 million on the Pentium® II processor. Perhaps the most significant trends are the rapidly declining costs involved with processing, storing, and distributing information. Between 1991 and 1995, the cost to perform one million instructions per second (MIPS) on a mainframe computer has dropped from approximately $92 dollars to about $21. In the same time period, the cost to store a Gigabyte of data, equal to eight billion on-off signals, has dropped from about $12 to about $3, and the cost to send a Megabyte, or eight million bits of data, from New York to Los Angeles via modem, has dropped from about $1 to about 15 cents. (All these examples are in constant 1995 dollars.) These trends are expected to continue. (2)

The New York Times reported on 10/6/98 that "the machines people buy today can handle up to 384 megabytes of memory, which is 1,500 times the maximum of the original I.B.M. personal computer. The current standard size of the hard drive on a new computer is about 6 Gigabytes, almost 47,000 times the size of its original floppy drive."

In 1958, William Higinbotham, then head of BNL's Instrumentation Division, designed what may have been one of the first video games. Back then, Brookhaven had visitors days in the fall, and thousands of people came to tour the Lab and see exhibits set up in the gymnasium. Higinbotham's game was an illustration of what the Instrumentation Division could design and build.

[pic]The game was run by an analog computer hooked up to an oscilloscope

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