1975 · 16-Bit Single-Chip Microprocessor · Work 893 of 1,871
A development office in Japan on a summer evening, on a grey steel desk a large green circuit board with rows of small black chips, in its centre a long flat almost black ceramic package five centimetres long with twenty gold legs on each side and a matt silver-grey square metal lid, plain smooth and unmarked, seated in a wide grey test socket with a small lever, a hand in a short white shirt sleeve pressing the lever down, a white porcelain teacup, a pencil, a sliding window of frosted glass, warm low evening light from the left.
What it was used for
The MN1610 was a 16-bit microprocessor on one chip developed by PANAFACOM, a Japanese joint venture that became PFU in 1987. The IPSJ Computer Museum gives the sequence: announced as the PANAFACOM-16A in April 1975, completed in August 1975, shown at WESCON 1975 in San Francisco and at the IEEE in Toronto, clocked at 2 MHz. It was built into the Lkit-16 learning kit of March 1977 at 98,000 yen for the base unit: a 48-key pad for one-step assembler entry, single-step running and breakpoints, a cassette interface, Tiny BASIC, and 1 KW of ROM and 0.5 KW of RAM as delivered.
What was new
The IPSJ Computer Museum calls the MN1610 the first 16-bit single-chip microprocessor from Japan and records that it appeared in the same year as the world's first ones. What it could do the same page states as a comparison: about twice the speed of the older 8-bit microcomputers at about 60 percent of the memory. The museum gives the Lkit-16's purpose as popularising 16 bits while 8-bit machines were the norm.
What the sources leave open: A single source, and it describes mainly the 1977 kit, the 1975 chip only briefly; it gives no production figures or price for the MN1610 itself. What other machines carried the MN1610 is not documented here. The memory sizes the museum gives belong to the Lkit-16, not to the processor. Whether the MN1610 ranked among the world's first the source leaves open; it calls it only the first from Japan.