Collaborate Disseminate
Intel processors, at least for PCs, are ubiquitous and have been for decades. Even beyond the chips specifically built by Intel, other companies have used their instruction set to build …read more Continue reading A System Board for the 8008
According to Smithsonian Magazine, a salvage company in London was cleaning out a property and found an odd-looking computer device. No one knew what it was, and they couldn’t find …read more Continue reading One Man’s Trash is… a Rare $60,000 Historical Computer
Calling any one computer the first hobby computer is fraught with peril. Most people think the MITS Altair 8800, first featured in Popular Electronics back in January 1975, was the …read more Continue reading Forget the Altair! Remember the Mark-8!
The last time we covered [Dr. Scott M. Baker], he made his Heathkit H8 run on a considerably older processor than it was made for. This time, apparently still not …read more Continue reading An Intel 8008 On A Single-Board Computer
[Ken Shirriff] is no stranger to Hackaday. His latest blog post is just the kind of thing we expect from him: a tear down of the venerable 8008 CPU. We suspect [Ken’s] earlier post on early CPUs pointed out the lack of a good 8008 die photo. Of course, he wasn’t satisfied to just snap the picture. He also does an analysis of the different constructs on the die.
Ever wonder why the 8008 ALU is laid out in a triangle shape? In all fairness, you probably haven’t, but you might after you look at the photomicrograph of the die. …read more
In the mid-1970’s there were several U.S.-based hobby electronics magazines, including Popular Electronics and Radio Electronics. Most people know that in 1975, Popular Electronics ran articles about the Altair 8800 and launched the personal computer industry. But they weren’t the first. That honor goes to Radio Electronics, that ran articles about the Mark 8 — based on the Intel 8008 — in 1974. There are a few reasons, the Altair did better in the marketplace. The Mark 8 wasn’t actually a kit. You could buy the PC boards, but you had to get the rest of the parts yourself. You …read more
If you maintain an interest in vintage computers, you may well know something of the early history of the microprocessor, how Intel’s 4-bit 4004, intended for a desktop calculator, was the first to be developed, and the follow-up 8008 was the first 8-bit device. We tend to like simple stories when it comes to history, and inventions like this are always conveniently packaged for posterity as one-off events.
In fact the story of the development of the first microprocessors is a much more convoluted one than it might appear, with several different companies concurrently at the forefront of developments. A …read more
Continue reading The Surprising Story Of The First Microprocessors
