Intel 4004

Summary

In 1968 Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore left the American IT manufacturer Fairchild and founded Intel. On behalf of the Japanese company Busicom, the new company is to develop microchips for calculators. After weighing the technical realization, Intel proposes the development of a freely programmable microprocessor. The Japanese contractors agreed in October 1969.

The revolutionary end product, called Intel 4004, has 2300 transistors on only one fingernail-sized chip with 400 kHz clocking - according to Intel - and 90,000 possible instructions per second. The young company confidently advertises its first CPU and thus the world’s first one-chip microprocessor as follows: “We are announcing a new era of integrated electronics!”

Intel later bought the design rights to the 4004 from Busicom for $60,000. Although the processor remained in production from 1971 to 1981, its successor, the Intel 8008 CPU, appeared just a year later.