Paul E. Ceruzzi
`
`The MIT Press
`
`Cambridge, Massachusetts
`London, England
`
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`

`© 1998 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
`
`All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
`any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying recording, or
`information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the
`publisher.
`
`This book was set in New Baskerville by Techset Composition Ltd, Salisbury, UK,
`and was printed and bound in the United States of America.
`
`Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publieation Data
`
`Ceruzzi, Paul E.
`
`A history of modern computing / Paul E. Ceruzzi.
`p. . cm. H— (History of compuu‘ng)
`Includes bihliographical references and index.
`ISBN 05262-032554 (hardcover : alk. paper)
`1. Computers—History. 2. Electronic data processing—History.
`1. Tide. H. Series.
`
`1998
`QA76.17.C47
`004T .09'045—dc21
`
`'
`
`98-22856
`
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`

`Dedication
`
`v
`
`Preface
`
`ix
`
`A cknowledgmenn
`
`xi
`
`Introduction: Defining “Computer”
`
`1
`
`I T
`
`he Advent of Commercial Computing, 1945—1956
`
`13
`
`4 7
`
`2 C
`
`omputing Comes ofAge, 1 956—1 964
`
`109
`
`143
`
`79
`
`3 T
`
`he Early History of Sofiware, 1952—1968
`
`4 F
`
`rom Mainfi'ame to Minicomputerg 1959—1969
`
`5 T
`
`he Go-Go Years and the System/360, 1961—1975
`
`1 77
`
`207
`
`6 T
`
`he Chip and Its Impact, 1965—1975
`
`7 T
`
`he Personal Computer; 1972-1977
`
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`

`9 W
`
`orkstatimas, UNIX, and the Net, 198141995
`
`281
`
`Conclusion: The Digitization of the World Picture
`
`307
`
`Notes
`
`313
`
`Bibliography
`Index
`383
`
`369
`
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`
`Ready or not, computers are coming to the people.
`That's good news, maybe the best since psychedelics.
`
`Those words introduced a story in the fifth anniversary issue of Rolling
`Stone] (December 7, 1972). “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death
`Among the Computer Bums” was written by Stewart Brand, a lanky
`Californian who had already made a name for himself as the publisher
`of the Whole Earth Catalog Brand’s resume was unique, even for an
`acknowledged hero of the counterculture. At Stanford in the 1960s, he
`
`had participated in Defense Department—sponsored experiments with
`hallucinogenic drugs. In 1968 he had helped Doug Engelbart demon-
`strate his work on interactive computing at a now—legendary session of
`the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.2 Brand was no
`stranger to computers or to the novel ways one might employ them as
`interactive tools.
`
`Brand was right. Computers did come to the people. The spread of
`computing to a mass market probably had a greater effect on society
`than the spread of mind-altering drugs. Personal computing, however,
`did not arrive in the way that Brand—or almost anyone else—thought it
`would. The development of personal computing followed a trajectory
`that is difficult to explain as rational. When trying to describe those
`years, from 1972 through 1977, one is reminded of Mark Twain’s words:
`“Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at
`all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.”3 This chapter
`will examine how computers came “to the people," not as Twain’s
`historian would have written it, but as it really occurred.
`What triggered Brand’s insight was watching people at the Stanford
`Artificial Intelligence Laboratory playing a computer game, Spacewar.
`Spacewar revealed computing as far from the do-not—fold—spindle—or—
`
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`used was personal: for fun, interactively, with no concern for how man
`ticks of the processor one was using. That was what people wanted whe-
`two years later, personal computers burst into the market.
`Spacewar was running on a PDP-10 In terms of its hardware, a PDP—I
`had nothing in common with the personal computers of the nex
`decades.4 It was largewevcn DEC’s own literature called it a mai
`frame.5 It had a 36-bit word length. A full system cost around a half
`million dollars and easily took up a room of its own It used discre'
`transistors and magnetic cores, not integrated circuits, for logic and.
`memory. Still, one can think of the PDP-10 as an ancestor of th
`personal computer. It was designed from the start to support interactive
`use. Although its time-sharing abilities were not as ambitious as those I'
`MIT’s Project MAC, it worked well. Of all the early time-sharing systems,
`the PDP—IO best created an illusion that each user was being given the:
`full attention and resources of the computer That illusion,
`created a mental model of what computing could be—a mental model
`that would later be realizedin genuine personal computers. 7
`Chapter 5 discussed the early development of time-sharing and th
`selection of a General Electric computer for Project MAC at MIT. Whil
`that was going on, the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory obtained
`DEC PDP-fi, the PDP—lO’s immediate predecessor, for its research (figur
`7.1). According to the folklore, MIT students, especially members of the;
`Tech Model Railroad Club, worked closely with DEC on the PDP-
`especially in developing an operating system for it, which would late
`have an influence on the PDP-IO’s system software.8 As a pun 0n the:
`Compatible Time Sharing System that was running on an IBM mad I
`frame nearby, the students called their PDP—6 system ITS—Incompatible
`Time Sharing System.9 The PDP-6 did not have the disk storag '
`necessary to make it a viable time-sharing system and only about:
`twenty were sold. The PDP—IO did have a random-access disk system:
`which allowed its users direct access to their own personal files.10 Like:
`other DEC computers, the PDP—lO also allowed users to load personal;
`files and programs onto inexpensive reels of DECtape, which fitted easily.
`into a briefcase.
`
`The feeling that a PDP—lO was one’s own personal computer came:-
`from its operating system—especially from the way it managed the mi
`of information to and from the disks or tapes. With MIT‘s help;
`DEC. supplied a system called “TOPS—10,” beginning in 1972. In th
`
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`
`
`: One of the most influential computers of all time, the DEC PURE, flanked by its
`' creators at the Mill, 1964. G. Gordon Bell is at the left, wearing the sports jacket.
`' The PDP-6 did not sell well butwas the prototype for the more successful PDP—lO
`and DEC System-20. It would have as much of an impact on the course of
`computing as the much more celebrated PDP—8, also introduced at that time.
`(Source: Digital Equipment Corporation.)
`
`introduction to the TOPS-10 manual, the authors stated, “Our goal has
`always been that in a properly configured system, each user has the
`feeling that he owns his portion of the machine for the time he needs to
`use it.”11 Users could easily create, modify, store, and recall blocks of
`data from a terminal. The system called these blocks by the already-
`familiar
`term, “files.” Files were named by one to six characters,
`followed by a period, then a three-character extension (which typically
`told what type of file it was, e.g.: xxxxxxBAS for a program written in
`BASIC). By typing DIR at a terminal users could obtain a directory of all
`the files residing on a disk. They could easily send the contents of a file
`to a desired output device, which typically consisted of a three-letter
`code,
`for example, LPT for
`line printer, or TTY for Teletype.12
`A small portion of TOPS-10 was always present in core memory. Other
`programs were stored on the disk and could be called up as necessary.
`One, called PIP (Peripheral Interchange Program), allowed users to
`
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`

`edit and manipulate text from a terminal. DDT (Dynamic Debugg-i
`Tool) allowed users to analyze programs and correct errors Witho‘u
`going through the long turnaround times that plagued batch processing
`For PDP—lO users, TOPS-10 was a marvel of simplicity and elegan __
`and gave them the illusion that they were in personal control. TOPSQI
`was like a Volkswagen Beetle: basic, simple, and easy to understand a I:-
`work with.13 Using a PDP~10 was not only fun but addictive. It was“
`accident that Brand saw people playing Spacewar on one, or that it w
`
`also the computer on which Adventure—perhaps the most long-lastin
`of all computer games—was written. M
`On the West Coast another system appeared with similar capabilities
`the SDS-940, offered by Scientific Data Systems (SDS) of soutlier
`California. The 940 was an extension of a conventional computer, th
`SDS 930, modified by researchers at Berkeley with support from th
`Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. The 940 wa
`more polished than the PDP—10, and it performed well. Still, the FDR-'10
`seemed to be preferred. At the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, th
`legendary lab where so much of personal computing would be created
`the staff was encouraged to use SDS machines, since Xerox had jug
`purchased SDS. But the researchers there resisted and instead built:-
`clone of a PDP—lO, which they called MAXC—Multiple Access Computer
`Xerox—the name a pun on Max Palevsky,
`the founder of SDS".1
`(Palevsky, after becoming very wealthy from the sale of SDS to Xerox
`dabbled in Hollywood movies, politics, and culture—and joined the
`board of Rolling Stone. Palevsky also became a venture capitalist with that
`money, helping to fund Intel, among other companies. )ib
`For a while, when Wall Street was enamored of anything connected
`with computers, it was easy to raise money to buy or lease a PDP~10o
`SDS-940, and then sell computer time to engineering companies o
`other customers. Most of these firms were undercapitalized and did no
`understaud the complexities of what
`they were selling. Like their
`counterparts in the electric utility industry,
`they had to have enough
`capacity to handle peak loads, in order not to discourage customers. Bu
`that meant that during off-peak times they would be wasting unused and
`expensive computing equipment. The capital requirements necessary to
`manage the cycles of the business were as large as they were in the
`electric power business, which had gone through decades of chaos and
`turmoil before settling down. Only a few survived,17 and even fewer, like
`
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`

`Calculators and Corporate Personal Computer Prty'ects
`
`
`ies, one is worth mentioning, Computer Center Corporation, or C-
`
`Cubed, which installed one of the first PDP—lOs in the Seattle area in
`968. While it was getting started, it offered a local teenager, Bill Gates,
`
`~; free time on the computer in exchange for helping find and rid the
`system of bugs. C—Cubed folded in 1970, having given Gates a taste of the
`
`otential of interactive computing.19
`Many of those who had access to these systems saw the future of
`omputing. But the financial troubles of tin1e~sharing companies also
`
`_ bowed that it would be difficult to make personal, interactive use widely
`I vailable. There were attempts to make terminals accessible to the public
`
`-'for free or at low cost—the most famous being the Resource One project
`'-m the San Francisco Bay area (partially funded by the Wrote Earth
`
`Catalog). But it did not last, either.20
`
`
`Economics prevented the spread of computing to the public from the
`top down—from large mainframes through time-shared terminals. But
`while those attempts were underway,
`the underlying technology was
`
`advancing rapidly. Could personal computing arrive from the bottom
`
`up—from advances in semiconductor electronics?
`Many engineers believe that a mental model of the personal computer
`
`was irrelevant. They believe that no one invented the personal compu-
`ter, it simply flowed from advances in semiconductors. Chuck House, an
`
`engineer involved with the early Hewletthackard calculators, said, “One
`
`could uncharitably say that we invented essentially nothing; we simply
`took all the ideas that Were out there and figured out how to implement
`them cost—effectively.” Gordon Bell stated, “The semiconductor density
`
`has really been the driving force, and as you reach different density
`
`levels, different machines pop out of that in time."21 To them, inven-
`
`tions are like a piece of fruit that falls to the ground when it is ripe, and
`the inventor is given credit for doing little more than picking it up. If
`that Were true, one would find a steady progression of machines offering
`
`personal, interactive use, as advances in semiconductors made them
`
`viable. And these would have come from established firms who had the
`
`
`
`
`
`engineering and manufacturing resources to translate those advances
`into products.
`
`
`
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`

`validate or refute the bottom—up explanation of the PC’s invention '
`The first electronic computers were of course, operated, as if the
`were personal computers. Once a person was granted access to I
`machine (after literally waiting in a queue), he or she had the who}
`computer to use, for whatever purpose. That gave way to more restricts:
`access, but those at MIT and Lincoln Labs who used the Whirlwind
`TX—O, and TX-2 that way never forgot its advantages. In 1962 some
`them developed a computer called the LING, made of Digital Equ p
`ment Corporation logic modules and intended for use by a researcher '
`a personal tool. A demonstration project, funded by the NIH. mad
`sixteen LINCs available to biomedical researchers. DEC produce
`commercial versions, and by the late 1960s, about 1,200 were in usei'a
`personal computers. A key feature of the LINC was its compact ta I
`drive and tapes that one could easily carry around: the forerunner t3
`DECtape. The ease of getting at data on the tape was radically differen
`from the clumsy access of tape in mainframes, and this ease would b
`repeated with the introduction of floppy—disk systems on persdn '-
`computers.22 DEC also marketed a computer that was a combinati
`of a LINC and a PDP—S, for $43,000. Although DECtape soon was offere"
`on nearly all DEC’s products, the LINC did not achieve the same kind 0'
`commercial success as the PDPFB and PDP—ll lines of minicomputersu2
`Advances1n chip density first made an impact on personal devices1
`calculators.24 For decades there had been a small market for machine
`that could perform the four functions of arithmetic, plus square root. I
`the 19503 and 1960s the calculator industry was dominated by firms such
`as- Friden and Marchant1n the United States, and Odhnerin Europe
`Their products were complex, heavy, and expensive. 25 In 1964 Wan
`Laboratories, a company founded by An Wang, a Chinese immigran
`who had worked with Howard Aiken at Harvard, came out with an
`electronic calculator. The Wang LOCI offered more functions, at a lowe
`cost, than the best mechanical machines. Its successor, the Wang 300
`was even easier to use and cheaper, partly because Wang deliberately se
`the price of the 300 to undercut the competitive mechanical calcuiator
`from Friden and others.26 (Only one or two of the mechanical calculate
`firms survived the transition to electronics.) A few years later Hewlett
`Packard, known for its oscilloscopes and electronic test equipment, cam
`out with the HP—QIOOA, a calculator selling for just under $5,000. An
`the Italian firm Olivetti came out with the Programma 101, a $350
`
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`

`
`of steps recorded on magnetic cards.27 Like the LINC, these calculators
`
`used discrete circuits. To display digits, the Wang used ”Nixie” tubes,
`
`an ingenious tube invented by Burroughs in 1957. HP used a small
`
`cathode—ray tube, as might be expected from a company that made
`
`oscilloscopes.
`
`By 1970 the first of a line of dramatically cheaper and smaller
`calculators appeared that used integrated circuits.28 They were about
`the size of a paperback book and cost as little as $400. A number of
`
`
`wealthy consumers bought them immediately, but it wasn’t until Bowmar
`
`advertised a BOWmar Brain for less than $250 for the 1971 Christmas
`
`season that
`the calculator burst
`into public consciousnesszg Prices
`
`plummeted: under $150 in 1972; under $100 by 1973; under $50 by
`
`1976; finally they became cheap enough to be given away as promotional
`trinke tag” Meanwhile Hewlett-Packard stunned the market in early 1972
`
`,with the HP—35, a $400 pocket calculator
`that performed all
`._.logarithmic and trigonometric functions required by engineers and
`
`scientists. Within a few years the slide rule joined the mechanical
`calculator on the shelves of museums?”
`
`
`Like processed foods, whose cost is mostly in the packaging and
`
`marketing,
`so with calculators:
`technology no longer determined
`
`commercial success. Two Japanese firms with consumer marketing
`
`
`I skills, Casio and Sharp, soon dominated. Thirty years after the comple-
`
`
`tion of the half-million dollar ENLAC, digital devices became throw-away
`
`
`commodities. The pioneering calculator companies either stopped
`
`
`making calculators, as did Wang, or went bankrupt, as did Bowmar.
`
`Hewlett-Packard survived by concentrating on more advanced and
`
`expensive models; Texas Instruments survived by cutting costs.
`
`The commodity prices make it easy to forget that these calculators
`were ingenious pieces of engineering. Some of them could store
`sequences of keystrokes in their memory and thus execute short
`
`programs. The first of the programmable pocket calculators was
`Hewlett-Packard’s H365,
`introduced in early 1974 for $795 (figure
`
`7.2). Texas Instruments and others soon followed. As powerful as they
`
`Were,
`the trade press was hesitant
`to call them computers, even if
`
`Hewlett-Packard introduced the HP—65 as a “personal computer"
`
`(possibly the first use of that term in print)” Their limited program-
`
`ming was offset by their built-in ability to compute logarithms and
`
`trigonometric functions, and to use floating-point arithmetic to ten
`
`
`
`SCEA Ex. 1014 Page 11
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`
`
`
`
`Figure 7.2
`HP—65. (Source: Smithsonian Institution.)
`
`decimal digits of precision. Few mainframes could do that with
`custom—written software.
`The introduction of pocket programmable calculators had sew
`profound effects on the direction of computing technology. The first'w
`that the calculator, like the Minuteman and Apollo programs offt
`1960s, created a market where suppliers could count on a long produ
`tion run, and thereby gain economies of scale and a low price. As 'chl'
`density, and therefore capability, increased, chip manufacturers fac
`the same problem that Henry Ford had faced with his Model T: on
`long production runs of the same product led to low prices, but marke-
`did not stay static. That was especially true of integratedcircuits, whic-
`by nature became ever more specialized in their function as the levels
`integration increased. (The only exception was in memory chips, wide
`is one reason why Intel was founded to focus on memories). Th
`calculator offered the first consumer market for logic chips that allorite
`companies to amortize the high costs of designing complex integrat '
`circuits. The dramatic drop in prices of calculators between 1971 an
`1976 showed just how potent this force was.3?’
`
`SCEA Ex. 1014 Page 12
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`

`ity and energy of masses of individuals. This force had already created
`the hacker culture at MIT and Stanford (observed with trepidation by at
`least one MIT professor).34 Their story is one of the more colorful
`among the dry technical narratives of hardware and software design.
`They and their accomplishments, suitably embellished, have become
`favorite topics of the popular press. Of course their strange personal
`habits made a good story, but were they true? Developing system
`software was hard work, not likely to be done well by a salaried employee,
`working normal hours and with a family to go home to in the evening.
`Time-sharing freed all users from the tyranny of submitting decks of
`cards and waiting for a printout, but it forced some users to work late at
`night, when the time-shared systems were lightly loaded and thus more
`responsive.
`The assertion that hackers created modern interactive computing is
`about half-right. In sheer numbers there may never have been more
`than a few hundred people fortunate enough to be allowed to “hack"
`(that is, not do a programming job specified by one’s employer) on a
`computer like the PUP-10. By 1975,
`there were over 25,000 HP—65
`
`programmable calculators in use, each one owned by an individual
`who could do whatever he or she wished to with it.35 Who were these
`
`people? HP—65 users were not “strange”. Nearly all were adult profes-
`sional men, including civil and electrical engineers, lawyers, financial
`
`people, pilots, and so on. Only a few were students (or professors),
`because they cost $795. Most purchased the HP—65 because they had a
`practical need for calculation in their jobs. But
`this was a personal
`
`machine—one could take it home at night. These users—perhaps 5 or
`10 percent of those who owned machines—did not fit the popular
`notion of hackers as kids with “ [t] heir rumpled clothes, their unwashed
`and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair.”36 But their passion for
`programming made them the intellectual cousins of the students in the
`Tech Model Railroad Club. And their numbers—only to increase as the
`prices of calculators dropped—were the first indication that personal
`computing was truly a mass phenomenon.
`Hewlett—Packard and Texas Instruments were unprepared for these
`events. They sold the machines as commodities; they could ill-afford a
`sales force that could walk a customer through the complex learning
`process needed to get the most out of one. That was what IBM sales-
`men were known for—but they sold multimillion dollar mainframes.
`
`SCEA Ex. 1014 Page 13
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`

`

`much more some of those customers wanted to do. Finding little help
`from the supplier,
`they turned to one another. Users groups, clubs,
`newsletters, and publications proliferated.
`This supporting infrastructure was critical to the success of personal
`computing; in the following decade it would become an industry all its
`own. Many histories of the personal computer emphasize this point; they
`often cite the role of the Homebrew Computer Club, which met near
`the Stanford campus in the mid-1970s, as especially important.” The
`calculator users groups were also important,
`though for different
`reasons. As the primitive first personal computers like the Altair gave
`way to more complete systems, a number of calculator owners purchased
`one of them as well. In the club newsletters there were continuous
`
`discussions of the advantages and drawbacks of each—the one machine
`having the ability to evaluate complex mathematical expressions with
`ease, the other more primitive but potentially capable of doing all that
`and more.38 There was no such thing as a typical member of the
`Homebrew Computer Club, although calculator owners tended to be
`professionals whose jobs required calculation during the day, and who
`thought of other uses at night. Many of them were bitten by the PC bug;
`at the same time they took a show-me attitude toward the computer.
`Could you rely on one? Could you use one to design a radar antenna?
`Could it handle a medium-sized mailing list? Was the personal computer
`a serious machine? At first the answers were, “not yet,” but gradually,
`with some firm prodding by this community, the balance shifted. Groups
`like the Homebrew Computer Club emphasized the “personal” in
`personal computer; calculator users emphasized the word computer.
`Ever since time—sharing and minicomputers revealed an alternative to
`mainframe computing, there have been prophets and evangelists who
`raged against
`the world of punched cards and computer rooms,
`promising a digital paradise of truly interactive tools. The most famous
`was Ted Nelson, whose self-published book Computer Lib proclaimed
`(with a raised fist on the cover): “You can and must understand
`computers now.”39 By 1974 enough of these dreams had become real
`that the specific abilities—and limits—of actual “dream machines" (the
`alternate title to Nelson’s book) had to be faced. Some of the dreamers,
`
`including Nelson, were unable to make the transition. They dismissed
`the pocket calculator. They thought it was puny, too cheap, couldn't do
`graphics, wasn’t a “von Neumann machine,” and so on.40 For them, the
`
`SCEA Ex. 1014 Page 14
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`

`the offices and homes of ordinary people. These computers would use a
`processor that was developed for other purposes, and adapted for the
`personal computer almost by accident. But they would be real and a
`constant source of inspiration and creativity to many who used them, as
`well as an equal source of frustration for those who knew how much
`
`better they could be.
`
`The Microprocessor
`
`Calculators showed what integrated circuits could do, but they did not
`
`open up a direct avenue to personal interactive computing. The chips
`used in them were too specialized for numerical calculation to form a
`basis for a general-purpose computer. Their architecture was ad-hoc and
`closely guarded by each manufacturer. What was needed was a set of
`integrated circuits—or even a single integrated circuit—that incorpo~
`rated the basic architecture of a general-purpose, stored-program
`cornputer.4‘2 Such a chip, called a “microprocessor,” did appear.
`In 1964 Gordon Moore, then of Fairchild and soon a cofounder of
`
`Intel, noted that from the time of the invention of integrated circuits in
`1958, the number of circuits that one could place on a single integrated
`circuit was doubling every year.43 By simply plotting this rate on a piece
`of semi-log graph paper, “Moore’s Law" predicted that by the mid 19705
`one could buy a chip containing logic circuits equivalent to those used in
`a 1950s—era mainframe.
`(Recall that the UNIVAC I had about 3,000
`tubes, about the same number of active elements contained in the first
`
`microprocessor discussed below.) By the late 19605 transistor-transistor
`logic (TTL) was well established, but a new type of semiconductor called
`metal—oxide semiconductor (MOS), emerged as a way to place even
`more logic elements on a chip}4 MOS was used by Intel to produce its
`pioneering 1103 memory chip, and it was a key to the success of pocket
`calculators. The chip density permitted by MOS brought the concept of
`a computer-on-a-chip into focus among engineers at Intel, Texas Instru-
`ments, and other semiconductor firms. That did not mean that such a
`
`device was perceived as useful. If it was generally known that enough
`transistors could be placed on a chip to make a computer, it was also
`generally believed that the market for such a chip was so low that its sales
`would never recoup the large development costs required.45
`
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`

`

`for the initial concept, Federico Faggin of Intel deserves credit fo
`realization in silicon, and Gary Boone of Texas Instruments design
`similar circuits around that time. In 1990, years after the microproces
`became a household commodity and after years of litigation, Gil Hya'
`an independent inventor from La Palma, California, received a pat
`on it. Outside the courts he has few supporters, and recent court riding
`may have invalidated his claim entirelyfd‘c‘
`The story of the microprocessors invention at Intel has been t
`many times. 47 In essence, it is a story encountered befzore Intel wa
`asked to design a special-purpose system for a customer It found that
`designing a general-purpose computer and using software to tailor it
`the customer5 needs, the product would have a larger market.
`Intel5 customer for this circuit was Busicom, ajapanese company th
`was a top seller of handheld calculators. Busicom sought to produc’
`line of products with different capabilities, each aimed at a differe'n
`market segment. It envisioned a set of custom~designed Chips tha
`incorporated the logic for
`the advanced mathematical
`functions
`Intel’s management assigned Marcian E. Hoff, who had joined. tli
`company in 1968 (Intel’s twelfth employee), to work with Busicom.
`Intel’s focus had always been on semiconductor memory chips. It h‘a
`shied away from logic chips like those suggested by Busicom, since it fe
`that markets for them were limited. Hoff’s insight was to recognize tha
`by designing fewer logic chips with more general capabilities, one cou _
`satisfy Busicom’5 needs elegantly. Hoff was inspired by the PDP—8, whic
`had a very small set ofinstructions, but which its thousands of users ha-
`programmed to do a variety of things. He also recalled using an 1B
`1620, a small scientific computer with an extremely limited instructio'"
`set that nevertheless could be programmed to do a lot of useful work:
`Hoff proposed a logic chip that incorporated more of the conceptso
`a general-purpose computer (figure 7. 3). A critical feature was the ability
`to call up a subroutine, execute it, and return to the main program_a
`needed.8He proposed to do that with a register that kept track of where;
`a program was in its execution and saved that status when interrupted t_
`perform a subroutine. Subroutines themselves could be interrupted
`with return addresses stored on a ”stack”: an arrangement of register
`that automatically retrieved data on a last—in—first—out basis.‘19
`With this ability, the chip could carry out complex operations store
`as subroutines in memory, and avoid having those functions perma
`
`SCEA Ex. 1014 Page 16
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`SCEA Ex. 1014 Page 16
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`

`

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`Figure 7.3
`(top) Patent for a “Memory System for a MulLi—Chip Digital Computer,” by M. E.
`Hoff, Stanley Mazor, and Federico Faggin oflntel. The patent was not specifically
`for a “computer on a chip," but note that all the functional blocks found in the
`processor of a stored-program computer are shown in this drawing. (bottom) Intel
`8080. (Source: Smithsonian Institution.)
`
`nently wired onto the chip. Doing it Hoff‘s way would be slower, but in a
`calculator that did not matter, since a person could not press keys that
`fast anyway. The complexity of the logic would now reside in software
`stored in the memory chips, so one was not getting something for
`nothing. But Intel was a memory company, and it knew that it could
`provide memory chips with enough capacity. As an added inducement,
`sales of the logic chips would mean more sales of its bread-and—butter
`memories.
`
`SCEA Ex. 1014 Page 17
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`SCEA Ex. 1014 Page 17
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`

`

`provide it with chips at a lower cost, giving Intel in return the right,
`market the chips to other customers for noncalcul
`I
`ator applica'ti
`From these unsophisticated negotiations with Bus
`in Noyc
`icom,
`__
`words, came a pivotal moment in the history of com
`'
`puting.50
`The result was a set of four chips, first advertised in a trade journal;
`late 1971, which included “a microprogrammable computer 6
`chip!”51 That was the 4004, on which one found all the basic registe
`and control functions of a tin , general-purpose stored-program coin-'15
`ter. The other chips contained a read—only memory (ROM), rando
`access memory (RAM), and a chip to handle output functions. The 40
`became the historical milestone, but the other chips were importan
`well, especially the ROM chip that supplied the code that turne
`general-purpose processor into something that could meet a customer
`needs. (Also at Intel, a '
`
`
`
`of the invention give Hoff sole credit; all players, including Hoff, no
`agree that that is not accurate. Faggin left Intel in 1974 to found a riv'a
`company, Zilog.
`Intel,
`in competition with Zilog,
`felt no need- 't_
`advertise Faggin’s talents in its promotional literature, although Inte
`
`never showed any outward hostility to its exit—employee.53
`whom to credit reveals the way many people think of invention: Hoff ha
`the idea of putting a general~purpose computer on a chip, Faggin and
`the others “merely” implemented that idea in silicon. At the time, Inte
`was not sure what it had invented either: Intel’s
`patent attorney resisted
`Hoff’s desire at the time to
`patent the work as a “computer.”54 Intel
`obtained two patents on the 4
`004, coveringits architecture and implemerr
`tation; Hoff‘s name appears on only one of them. (That opened the door
`to rival claims for patent royalties from TI, and eventually Gil Hyatt.)
`The 4004 worked with groups of four hits at a time——enough to code
`decimal digits but no more. At almost the same time as the Work with
`
`SCEA Ex. 1014 Page 18
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`
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`SCEA Ex. 1014 Page 18
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`

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`produce a set of chips for a terminal to be attached to mainframe
`computers. Again, Mazor and Hoff proposed a microprocessor to
`handle the terminal’s logic. Their proposed chip would ha