On
November 15, 1971, Intel publicly debuted the first commercial single-chip microprocessor, the Intel 4004, with an advertisement in
Electronic News. Fifty years later, here’s a look at its legacy—and how the 4004 stacks up against a modern Intel powerhouse.
The First Commercial Single-Chip Microprocessor
In 1969, a Japanese calculator manufacturer called
Busicom hired Intel to create chips for a calculator that Busicom designed. Intel devised a chipset (called the
MCS-4—short for “Micro Computer System”) composed of four integrated circuits (ICs) that dramatically simplified the calculator’s internal design. In delivering its solution, Intel developed and commercialized the world’s first single-chip microprocessor, the Intel 4004. It also designed three supporting chips: the 4001, 4002, and 4003. Of these, the 4002 was a RAM chip with a mere 40 bytes of memory.
The Intel 4004 first launched as part of the
Busicom 141-PF calculator in mid-1971 (which you can
simulate online in your browser). After a contract renegotiation with Busicom, Intel became free to sell the MCS-4 chipset to others. Intel introduced the Intel 4004 to the general market by placing an ad in the November 15, 1971 issue of Electronic News, which was a prominent industry magazine at the time.
The original 4004 advertisement announces “a new era of integrated electronics”—one of the rare times advertising copy wasn’t exaggerating. The ad’s illustration shows the four MCS-4 chips looming large over a pair of people at a computer, and the text boldy proclaims, “a micro-programmable computer on a chip!”
Prior to the Intel 4004, computer
central processing units (“CPUs”) were usually one or several circuit boards packed with ICs and discrete electronic components. Thanks to innovations at Intel, all of that circuitry could be compressed down into a single piece of silicon smaller than a fingernail. The radical miniaturization represented by the 4004 made small computers possible and home computers practical over the coming decade.
