Stan Mazor News Today

Intel's groundbreaking 8008 microprocessor was produced over 50 years ago, the ancestor of the x86 processor family that you may be using right now.

When Federico Faggin arrived at Intel in 1970, he immediately discovered that he’d stepped into a royal mess. He’d left Fairchild Semiconductor and accepted the position at Intel before being fully briefed on the custom chip set project for Busicom that would eventually become the first commercially successful microprocessor, the 4004. Faggin had developed a…

Why the inventor of the silicon chip deserves more credit for the microprocessor

I was just chatting with the folks at Synaptics about their recently launched FlexSense family of teeny-tiny multi-modal smart sensor processors. Actually, I was thinking about using “Teeny-Tiny Multi-Modal Smart Sensor Processors” as the title for this column, but I saw “Reimagining How Humans Engage with Machines and Data” on some of their materials and…

Early microprocessors straddled two major computing epochs. During the first epoch, stretching from the late 1960s through the 1970s, computer system engineers designed and implemented minicomputer processor architectures and processor boards using TTL parts, bipolar PROMs, stone knives, and bearskins. Each minicomputer maker – including Digital Equipment Corp (DEC), Data General (DG), Prime, Computer Automation,…

A tech veteran ponders on the product that kickstarted Intel’s domination.