The Microprocessor: Engine of the Technology Revolution
computer industry. Things change so fast, no simple extrapolation of the present is likely to resemble the future in any important way. The impact of the microprocessor is even more daunting to predict, since it is revolutionizing so many facets of modern life. When Bob Noyce and I founded Intel in 1968, our challenge was to make semiconductor memory practical. This goal was quite a stretch, considering that silicon memory was at least 100 times more expensive than magnetic core memory, the dominant technology at the time. Having delivered our first couple of memory products to market, we were looking for new worlds to conquer when the Japanese manufacturer Busicom asked us to design a set of chips for a family of programmable scientific and business calculators. At the time, all logic chips were hard-wired for a particular application. Busicom's family of calculators required at least a dozen different chips, a task that far outstripped the design engineering capacity of tiny Intel. But Intel engineer Ted Hoff realized a general-purpose computer architecture could do all the calculator functions and need not be more complex than the memory chips we were already working with. He proposed a CPU chip that took instructions from a stored program in read-only