Marketing (was Re: Columbus analogy (Was: Corrections to trivia

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Mon Oct 12 16:49:53 1998

I wrote:
> Even if not everyone here agrees that being on a single chip is a necessary
> condition for something to be called a microprocessor, to the best of my
> knowledge no one disagrees with the claim that Intel as the first to make
> a single-chip CPU.

Sam wrote:
> I do. Ray Holt did it with AMI working for Garrett AiResearch in 1970.

I read the web pages, but Microsoft Word 97 SR1 refuses to open any of the
papers. The description on the web page doesn't seem to substantiate your
claim that one of his chips could serve by itself as a usable CPU. The SLF
chip apparently contains the control logic for a CPU, but the description
does not suggest that it fetches instructions from memory.

Russell Fish's "Analysis of the CADC F-14 Flight Computer" likens the
SLF to the F8 CPU. However, the F8 CPU does in fact contain a program
counter, as has been discussed here before. The F8 CPU is capable of fetching
instructions, branching, and subroutine calls under its own control, as was
(for example) the Intel 4004. The description of the SLF does not allude to
any such capability.

They were definitely quite remarkable chips for the time.
Received on Mon Oct 12 1998 - 16:49:53 BST