Wed, 15 Nov 2006

Intel Releases 4004 Microprocessor Schematics

I remember this chip, and the wave of homebrew stuff that followed in magazines. A friend and I actually built a calculator in '72 or '73 from a 4004 and a schematic we found in Popular Electronics - he'd picked up a sample 4004 from a buddy who was an intern at a GM plant in Indy, and we got to experiment. They were pretty expensive when first released, if I recall correctly. Hard to believe it's been 35 years.

Intel is celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Intel 4004, their very first microprocessor, by releasing the chip's schematics, maskworks, and users manual. This historic revelation was championed by Tim McNerney, who designed the Intel Museum's newest interactive exhibit. Opening on November 15th, the exhibit will feature a fully functional, 130x scale replica of the 4004 microprocessor running the very first software written for the 4004. To create a giant Busicom 141-PF calculator for the museum, 'digital archaeologists' first had to reverse-engineer the 4004 schematics and the Busicom software. Their re-drawn and verified schematics plus an animated 4004 simulator written in Java are available at the team's unofficial 4004 web site. Digital copies of the original Intel engineering documents are available by request from the Intel Corporate Archives. Intel first announced their 2,300-transistor 'micro-programmable computer on a chip' in Electronic News on November 15, 1971, proclaiming 'a new era of integrated electronics.' Who would have guessed how right they would prove to be?

(link) [Slashdot]

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