Designing the first microprossor

We now routinely buy personal computers in which microprocessors with millions of transistors perform at gigahertz speeds, so it is easy to forget that the first microprocessor was not a simple or obvious choice to produce. At the time it was being contemplated, metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) technology was still quite new, and integrated circuits themselves had existed less than a decade. While MOS circuits with a thousand transistors were being manufactured, the economics of integrated circuits of that day limited how far the technology could be pushed. The paper discusses how rethinking a customer's specifications led to simplifications that made the first microprocessor possible.