This week’s milestone in the history of technology is the birth of the microprocessor, allowing software—or "artificial intelligence"—to run everywhere.
November 15, 1971
The Intel 4004, 4-bit central processing unit (CPU), is publicly mentioned for the first time in an Electronic News advertisement declaring “a new era in integrated electronics." It was the first general-purpose programmable microprocessor. T.R. Reid wrote in The Chip (1984):
‘General-purpose,’ [Intel’s marketing director Ed] Gelbach saw, was just another way of saying ‘pervasive.’ The real markets for the new device, he said, would be completely new markets; with this one-chip general processor—known today as microprocessor—the integrated circuit could ‘insert intelligence into so many products for the first time.’
Two years earlier, Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation (also known as Busicom) approached Intel to design 12 custom chips for its new printing calculator. Intel responded by suggesting a family of just four chips, including one that could be programmed for use in a variety of products, “setting in motion an engineering feat that dramatically altered the course of electronics.”
Federico Faggin, who was asked to design the new chip set when he joined Intel in April 1970, wrote two decades later:
…I thought that the chip could be used for many other applications. Unfortunately, Intel's management disagreed, thinking that the 4000 family was good only for calculators. Furthermore, the 4000 family had been designed under an exclusive contract. It could not be announced or sold to anyone but Busicom.
The opportunity to prove that the 4000 family was good for other applications came when the need for a production tester arose. The tester was clearly not a calculator application, so I decided to use the 4004 as the tester's main controller. In that project, I gained considerable insight into what could and could not be done with the 4000 family. When the tester was successfully completed, I had additional ammunition to convincingly lobby for the 4000 family's introduction.
I urged Robert Noyce, then president of Intel, to market the 4004. I suggested that perhaps Intel could trade some price concessions for nonexclusivitNoyce succeeded in obtaining nonexclusivity from Busicom for the 4004 for applications other than calculators. Shortly after that, in mid-1971, Intel decided to market the 4000 family.
In November 1971, the 4000 family, now known as MCS-4 (for Microcomputer System 4-bit), was officially introduced with an advertisement in major trade publications. The main caption read, "Announcing a new era of integrated electronics" - a very prophetic ad.
Jeffrey Zygmont in Microchip (2003):
The announcement in Electronic News proclaimed that the 4004, when combined with the appropriate memory chips, would “provide complete computing and control functions for host systems, data terminals, billing machines, measuring systems, numerical control systems and process control systems.” It mentioned nothing about traffic lights or elevators, but people who made or used machines soon started thinking for themselves. For one, there was the meatpacker who telephoned [Intel’s head of MOS design department] Les Vadasz looking for help weighing bacon. To put together one-pound packages, his meat cutters had to take great pains to trim the last piece, slicing it maybe a little larger, maybe a little smaller, to bring the package weight to exactly one pound. The hog butcher wondered whether he could attach a chip-based controller to a scale and a slicer to automatically adjust the thickness of the last slice to tally one pound. “I thought it was brilliant,” says Vadasz. “Those are the kind of things that suddenly were possible.”
On November 17, 2010, Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, and Stanley Mazor were awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Barack Obama for their pioneering work on the 4004.
In 2011, on the 40th anniversary of the invention of the microprocessor, Federico Faggin expressed his conviction that “even if quantum computers will become a reality,” computers will not be able to match human intelligence. “I think that human intelligence, especially in the lower manifestations of it, will be aided tremendously by computers, but there are aspects of human capacities that we don’t define as intelligence, which have to do with intuition, will, intention, imagination and creativity… Consciousness is the ability that human beings have to experience, to think, to know that they know, or to know that they don’t know. A machine cannot do that,” said Faggin.