LWN: Comments on "Andy Grove——dead at 79 (Ars Technica)"

Interviews with the makers of the 4004

Jonno — Mon, 28 Mar 2016 21:36:23 +0000

> I think the will actually explicitly said the previous one or two years ...
It says "during the preceding year" (well, actually it says "under det förlupne året"...).

integrated circuit != microprocessor

mbg — Sun, 27 Mar 2016 22:21:14 +0000

c.f. nice little article by Ken Shirriff on the TMX-1795, which he believes was the first microprocessor.

http://www.righto.com/2015/05/the-texas-instruments-tmx-1...

Incidentally, it was in the footnotes of this article where I came across the Computer History Museum oral history panel interviews with Hoff, Faggin & Shima about the 4004.

Interviews with the makers of the 4004

Wol — Sun, 27 Mar 2016 17:55:58 +0000

I think the will actually explicitly said the previous one or two years ...

Cheers,
Wol

Andy Grove——dead at 79 (Ars Technica)

leifbk — Sun, 27 Mar 2016 10:16:11 +0000

http://silicongenesis.stanford.edu/complete_listing.html

Key player in the late-1990s commercial Linux shift

dmarti — Fri, 25 Mar 2016 22:06:57 +0000

Remember the late 1990s, when bickering Unix vendors were pricing themselves into irrelevance, while the rest of the industry gradually resigned itself to Windows NT? Here's an old copy of InfoWorld just in case you don't.

But read the Intel cover story, on Intel investing in Red Hat, getting Linux into hardware standards groups, doing all the stuff we take for granted in hardware vendors today. We have Dr. Grove to thank for that.

Interviews with the makers of the 4004

bronson — Fri, 25 Mar 2016 17:26:40 +0000

Well, it often takes many decades just to prove that a new idea is right. (Higgs is one example of many)

If you restrict an award to, say, less than ten years after discovery, you probably also restrict it to never be awarded for truly insightful, ground-breaking ideas.

Interviews with the makers of the 4004

mpr22 — Fri, 25 Mar 2016 13:04:31 +0000

Megawatts and hundreds of square feet is overcooking the hyperbole just a teensy bit there ;)

The internet tells me (on the websites of people who restore old computers) that the original PDP-8 (1965) draws 400 watts and occupies 7.9 sq. ft., and even the PDP-1 (1959) apparently ran off single-phase American mains AC so can't have been drawing more than a couple of kilowatts.

Interviews with the makers of the 4004

Wol — Fri, 25 Mar 2016 07:25:30 +0000

Well, if they actually followed the terms of the will that set the prizes up, NONE of them would have been eligible !!!

I'm not sure whether the will explicitly sets a time limit, but it's supposed to be RECENT research, and most prizes are awarded in middle age for stuff they did as a student...

Cheers,
Wol

The AGC was not microprocessor-based

mbg — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 23:58:03 +0000

Quoting from wikipedia on the AGC "[the] Block I version used 4,100 ICs, each containing a single three-input NOR gate".

To my mind, that's a long way from a microprocessor. I'd say a key feature is putting at least the ALU or an ALU slice on a single chip.

Interviews with the makers of the 4004

mathstuf — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 20:04:13 +0000

I imagine she might have been the fourth on the list to receive it if they didn't exclude deceased candidates. Or do they only accept 3?

Interviews with the makers of the 4004

rahvin — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 18:06:27 +0000

You are correct (I didn't know this), IC's were invented prior to the moonshot (though the first customer of IC's was the US airforce) but IIRC the moonshot was what took the IC work and created the microprocessor due to the weight restrictions on the Apollo program.

My memory of the history is that the Apollo computer problem (having a reliable computer that could compute trajectories and burns) in the allowed weight window and size restriction was critical to the project even being feasible (slide rules were the calculators at the time) and the money thrown at the problem took the preliminary IC work and created the base for the first microprocessor as prior to the moonshot the IC was a limited use technology.

This website would seem to agree with my memory: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/6131/Integrated-Ci...

It was the Apollo computer and it's incredible shrinking of computer power that created the modern microprocessor industry as prior to Apollo if you wanted a computer you needed a few Megawatts and several hundred square feet. The Apollo computer used several watts and occupied 1 cubic foot which was revolutionary. It was shortly after this that Intel developed the first commercial single chip CPU.

Interviews with the makers of the 4004

mpr22 — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 14:49:39 +0000

Rosalind Franklin, who died in 1958 of ovarian cancer, four years before Crick, Watson, and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize for Biology.

Interviews with the makers of the 4004

Wol — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 10:49:21 +0000

Is that the science was discovered, or the technology was invented?

Not that I know about the history of the integrated circuit, but one only has to look at the history of Penicillin, DNA, and other scientific breakthroughs, to realise that the person who did the work is rarely the person who got the credit.

Fleming noticed on a Petri dish that one mould was killing another - that was in about 1910. Carey (have I got that right?) succeeded in growing the mould and turning it into a drug in the 1930s. The fact that I can't even remember his name properly and he was the guy who invented the medicine says something!

Crick and Watson are credited with "discovering DNA" because their paper was the first to be published. But it appears that their paper was what I call "secondary research" - they looked at and synopsised the work of others, in particular a female PhD student who's name I can't remember ... they get the credit because they got to print first, but most of it was actually her work.

And computing - we know all about Ada Lovelace, but how many people think computing dates from the 50s?

Or my pet moan, "Edison invented the electric lightbulb" - except that his FIRST patent postdates a visit to an electric lightbulb *factory* in Birmingham.

Cheers,
Wol

Interviews with the makers of the 4004

NRArnot — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 10:16:41 +0000

The integrated circuit predates president Kennedy and the USA moonshot program. According to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit they were invented by Jack Kilby in 1958.

integrated circuit != microprocessor

mbg — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 06:49:30 +0000

though parentage of the microprocessor is a matter of some minor controversy itself...

Interviews with the makers of the 4004

rahvin — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 20:36:16 +0000

I haven't read the links but you aren't attributing to Intel the invention of integrated circuits are you? That came out of all the money NASA through at computers as part of the moon landing. The number of things that were invented for the moon landing and continue to impact our world today is staggering. Not surprising really given the amount of money that was spent but it's amazing how much our world changed because of the base science and engineering that went into it.

Andy Grove——dead at 79 (Ars Technica)

rsidd — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 13:37:42 +0000

Yup, else you're likely to get a "4004: not found" (sorry -- couldn't resist)

Interviews with the makers of the 4004

mbg — Tue, 22 Mar 2016 22:38:31 +0000

I second the recommendation to read those 4004 interviews. Amazing history that I knew little about, for instance that an Italian physicist and a Japanese organic chemist were instrumental in the birth of the microprocessor.

There were a bunch of others about subsequent processors (like the Z80) but the 4004 story was the most exciting one for me

Andy Grove——dead at 79 (Ars Technica)

JoeBuck — Tue, 22 Mar 2016 22:34:51 +0000

Federico Faggin wasn't just the layout engineer for the 4004, he did the circuit design and turned Hoff's proposal for an architecture into one that actually worked. Go read the interviews, both Faggin and Hoff basically agree on that. Hoff had the idea for the product, Faggin made it happen.

Andy Grove——dead at 79 (Ars Technica)

landley — Tue, 22 Mar 2016 20:33:21 +0000

P.S. You might be able to dig the originals out of archive.org, they used to live at:

http://www.stanford.edu/group/mmdd/SiliconValley/SiliconG...
http://www.stanford.edu/group/mmdd/SiliconValley/SiliconG...
http://www.stanford.edu/group/mmdd/SiliconValley/SiliconG...
http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/oral_his...

(But as you can see, there's a reason I mirror computer history stuff...)

Rob

Andy Grove——dead at 79 (Ars Technica)

landley — Tue, 22 Mar 2016 20:26:13 +0000

Andy Grove was cool but there's more to the story than that. Here are mirrors of old interviews with the people who actually created the microprocessor.

Ted Hoff (inventor of the 4004):

http://landley.net/history/mirror/intel/Hoff.html

Federico Fagin (layout engineer who made the 4004 mask and went on to found Zilog, which did the Z80):

http://landley.net/history/mirror/interviews/Faggin.html

Their immediate supervisor Gordon Moore:

http://landley.net/history/mirror/interviews/Moore.html

And Masatoshi Shima of Busicom, the customer who commissioned the 4004 and then gave the IP rights back to get the price down:

http://landley.net/history/mirror/intel/shima.html

Rob