Intel likes to portray itself as the inventor of the microprocessors. However, under patent law, this honor goes to Texas Instruments. How did it all start?

The first 25 Years in the history of microprocessors The early years x 86: Birth of an industry Z 80 forever RISC & CISC AIM Alliance Texas Ranger Article in c’t 27 / 2020 read As Intel’s head of development Federico Faggin in June 1971 looked in the “Electronics News”, he was amazed. A multi-page ad advertised a CPU-on-a-chip that Texas Instruments (TI) had developed for Computer Terminal Corporation (CTC). There was no official name for the chip yet, later it was called TMX 1795, a MOS chip with 3078 Transistors.

Faggin was shocked, Intel was actually intended as the first supplier for CTC, TI was only supposed to be a second source: The CPU concept, which was strongly based on the existing discrete processor from CTC , after all, came from Intel. But the cooperation with the client CTC did not work as planned, especially since the project for the 8-bit chip 1201 for a while, especially because Intel’s developer Feeney was withdrawn for other, more urgent tasks. In January 1971 Faggin took on the project . Until then he had been working on another job with colleagues, on a family of four chips around the 4/8-bit processor 4004 (8-bit register, 4-bit ALU and 4-bit data bus).

The Japanese company Busicom ordered and also sent her best engineer Masatoshi Shima to Santa Clara. He had been fine-tuning the concept of the 3078 family for some time. He came to the USA at the end of 1969 and submitted on the one hand the young company Mostek, on the other hand the two Intel engineers Stan Mazor and Ted Hoff. But they had little idea of ​​Logic Design, Mazor came from software and Hoff was more of a memory expert. Not until April 1970 Federico Faggin from Fairchild Intel came and took over the project management, the whole thing got the necessary momentum. It only took a little more than half a year for the first prototypes to run.

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