The 8080

1974 · Second-Generation 8-Bit Microprocessor · Work 886 of 1,871

A computer room in an engineering firm in California, in the foreground a bare hand in a white shirt cuff holding up a long white ceramic chip five centimetres long with forty short gold legs, its square gold lid lifted away to show in a small grey hollow a tiny silvery-grey crystal with fine gold wires, the loose gold lid in the open palm of the other hand, plain smooth and unmarked, behind it a row of tall minicomputer cabinets of beige and blue sheet steel with small red lamps and white paddle switches, a tape drive with two large reels behind glass, a raised floor of grey tiles, cool fluorescent light.

What it was used for
An 8-bit processor sold on the open market. The Centre for Computing History gives the announcement as the Electronics issue of 12 April 1974, carrying an article by Masatoshi Shima and Federico Faggin, a 2 MHz clock, about 6,000 transistors and a 40-pin package. Electronics360 gives over 70 instructions, a 16-bit address bus for 64 KB and about 290,000 instructions per second, and lists the Altair 8800 kit (1975), the IMSAI 8080, the SOL-20, the Hugin 150 cash register, Midway's arcade game Gun Fight and Space Invaders, whose developer reportedly imported 8080 chips from the United States.
What was new
What it could do that the 8008 could not: address 64 KB instead of 16 KB, with 40 pins instead of 18, at 2 MHz instead of 800 kHz and about 290,000 instead of at most 80,000 instructions per second. Intel was not alone: per The Chip Letter, Motorola announced the 6800 in March 1974, needing only a single 5 V supply where rivals needed 5, -5 and 12 V, but running at only 1 MHz and reaching full production only in November 1974. The two authors of the announcement did not stay: the Computer History Museum lists Faggin as co-founder and CEO of Zilog and Shima as the designer of the logic of the 1976 Z80.

What the sources leave open: A conflict over sequence: the Centre for Computing History dates the 8080 announcement to 12 April 1974, while The Chip Letter says Motorola announced the 6800 in March 1974, about a month after Intel. Both passages were read; who announced first remains open. The often-quoted launch price of 360 USD could not be verified outside Wikipedia.

Connections

Every connection names its kind. “Forerunner” on its own would be a claim.

  1. Follows fromThe 80081972Masatoshi Shima, who began work on the 8080 in November 1972, calls it "just an improvement over the 8008". Intel names Federico Faggin as lead designer of the 8080 and its predecessor processors; the 1974 chip ran about ten times faster than the 8008 and had 40 pins instead of 18.Source: IEEE ETHW, Oral History: Masatoshi Shima · Intel Newsroom: 50 Years Ago - Celebrating the Influential Intel 8080
  2. Works withThe Altair 88001975Intel describes the Altair 8800 as one of the first personal computers, with the 8080 working at its heart. The machine had neither keyboard nor monitor, and users had to solder their own connections.Source: Intel Newsroom: 50 Years Ago - Celebrating the Influential Intel 8080

Further reading