The history of the microcomputer-invention and evolution

Intel's founder, Robert Noyce, chartered Ted Hoff's Applications Research Department in 1969 to find new applications for silicon technology-the microcomputer was the result. Hoff thought it would be neat to use MOS LSI technology to produce a computer. Because of the ever growing density of large scale integrated (LSI) circuits a "computer on a chip" was inevitable. But in 1970 we could only get about 2000 transistors on a chip, and a conventional CPU would need about 10 times that number. We developed two "microcomputers" 10 years ahead of "schedule," by scaling down the requirements and using a few other "tricks" described in this paper.