[HN Gopher] How Ted Hoff invented the first microprocessor
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How Ted Hoff invented the first microprocessor
Author : rbanffy
Score : 39 points
Date : 2022-10-11 10:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| kragen wrote:
| Some say that the short answer is that Masatoshi Shima gave him
| the logical design and then visited California to browbeat him
| into actually getting the chip working. For some reason he's not
| mentioned by name in this article.
| neonate wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20221012072905/https://spectrum....
|
| https://archive.ph/Iqbk3
| ahefner wrote:
| Fascinating read - Ted Hoff is a true engineer's engineer. I
| hadn't heard of him.
| klelatti wrote:
| For me this is the key quote:
|
| > Hoff never even considered patenting the microprocessor. To him
| the invention seemed to be obvious.
|
| I agree with him. The microprocessor wasn't really an invention -
| it was a 'technical milestone'. Once other techniques had been
| mastered then it was obvious it would happen.
|
| Credit to Hoff for spotting that a single chip CPU would work in
| this case but that was really about being in the right place at
| the right time.
|
| On the other hand Faggin did contribute some real inventions that
| made the 4004 possible and actually built the thing!
| kabdib wrote:
| Ted Hoff worked in Atari Corporate Research (before Atari broke
| up / was purchased in 1984). This story was told to me by a
| friend who worked in ACR:
|
| Ted had a pad of conductive foam with a number of 8008 processors
| (a few dozen, perhaps). From time to time he would be contacted
| by someone in the US government asking if he had any of those
| chips around.
|
| He would pick one out, carefully package it and mail it off.
| Since the applications were almost always very secret, he never
| found out what they were actually for.
|
| (These days, you'd just write a cycle and pin accurate emulator,
| or design an FPGA equivalent. Not an option back then).
| analog31 wrote:
| Better still, if you're using Arduino, you just choose a
| different target processor from the pull-down menu, recompile,
| and off you go.
|
| Of course I'm over-simplifying, but in fact, the portability of
| Arduino code across platforms has saved my bacon a few times
| during the chip shortage. There's always some overhead, such as
| changing a wiring harness, but it's better than being dead in
| the water.
| el_chamo wrote:
| Misleading title when the content says things like.
|
| "Federico Faggin was assigned to design the chip, and in nine
| months came up with working prototypes"... "Faggin recalled that
| when he began implementing the microprocessor, Hoff seemed to
| have lost interest in the project, and rarely interacted with
| him."
|
| Kind of having a title like: "How Steve Jobs invented the first
| commercial personal computer" and then inside the article saying
| actually "Steve Wozniak designed the motherboard, power supply,
| video interface...."
| fofoz wrote:
| The signature of Federico Faggin is engraved in all 4004 chips.
|
| https://sites.google.com/site/microprocessorintel4004/home/f...
| [deleted]
| pbhowmic wrote:
| And this article bubbles up on the day Intel lays off 20k
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(page generated 2022-10-12 23:00 UTC)