Learning about Intel microprocessor history will teach you a lot about how computer processors have evolved over the years, and how we have reached the advanced stage of processors today. Intel Corporation was founded in July 1968, and today it is the world’s biggest semiconductor chip manufacturer. The proportion of personal computers that run on Intel chips today is simply mind-boggling, to say the least. The company is based in Santa Clare, California and the name was coined as an abbreviation of Integrated Electronics Corporation.

The First Step

Intel 4004 was the world’s first single chip microprocessor, and was created by Intel in November 1971. Ted Hoff, Federico Fagging and Stan Mazola are the people who came up with this amazing chip for the time, which combined the CPU, the memory, and the input output ports of a computer on to one single chip, which was astoundingly small for the time. This was only the beginning of the long history of computer processors.

The need for the 4004 chip came up in 1969, when a Japanese client called Busicom asked Intel to make them 12 different chips for a variety of computing purposes, for an advanced calculator. But Intel did not have enough people to make these chips, so they suggested that they could put all the features into one single chip. Busicom agreed, and Intel microprocessor history was made. In another twist of events, Intel bought the chip back from Busicom for $60,000 after a few months, and Busicom soon went bankrupt without releasing a single product with the 4004 chip. Read the rest of this entry »