A demonstration table in a customer meeting room in Santa Clara in California on a bright spring day, a grey teleprinter at one side with its keyboard turned away, from it a long strip of yellow paper tape with rows of small round holes running across the white tabletop, on the tape an elongated chip three centimetres long of dark violet-grey ceramic with a large slightly scratched gold lid and eighteen short silvery-gold legs, plain smooth and unmarked, a bare hand in a short shirt sleeve smoothing the tape flat, a second hand in a dark suit sleeve reaching for the chip, two coffee cups, sunlight through tall windows.
What it was used for
A single-chip processor ordered by Computer Terminal Corporation to replace the processor of its data station, which was built from about 100 TTL packages. EEJournal gives CTC's order of 18 March 1970 for 100,000 parts at 30 USD each, 3 million USD in all. CTC evaluated the chip in late 1971 and declined, since the Datapoint 2200's bit-serial TTL processor was faster; Intel then marketed it itself, announced on 13 March 1972 in a one-page item in Electronics headed "8-bit parallel processor offered on a single chip". EEJournal names early versions of Hewlett-Packard's 2640 terminal as an application.
What was new
What it could do: handle 8 bits in parallel and address 16 KB with 14 address bits, four times the 4004's reach. 3,500 transistors on a only slightly larger die; 18 pins, which the design got only because the 1103 memory's package had 2 legs more than the 16 originally planned; a two-phase 800 kHz clock and a minimum of 5 processor states, that is 10 clocks, per instruction - at most 80,000 instructions per second. The original design had no usable interrupt because the return address was not pushed onto the stack; a six-month pause in the project, while it was unclear whether CTC really wanted the chip, allowed the fix. Texas Instruments built the same instruction set as the TMX 1795 but never offered it commercially.
What the sources leave open: EEJournal points out explicitly that April 1972 is often cited and that some sources wrongly say 1974; it dates the announcement to 13 March 1972. No checked source gives an open-market price, only the 30 USD of the CTC order. EEJournal and oldcomputers.net agree that CTC fitted neither chip.
Connections
Every connection names its kind. “Forerunner” on its own would be a claim.
Works withThe Micral N1973André Truong Trong Thi and François Gernelle designed the 1973 Micral around the Intel 8008 for process control; most units ran in real-time applications such as tollbooths, and only a few were sold as personal computers.Source: Computer History Museum, Revolution: Micral (R2E, 1973)