The Making of the First Microprocessor

Although I didn't know it at the time, my early work experience turned out to be absolutely invaluable, setting the stage for my future career. Born, raised, and educated in northern Italy, I graduated in radio technology from the A. Rossi Technical Institute in Vicenza in 1960. My first job was assistant engineer at the Olivetti Electronic R&D Laboratory near Milan, where Olivetti was developing its early electronic computers. By a series of fortunate coincidences, in 1961 I ended up codesigning and building a small experimental electronic computer with 4K words of magnetic core memory. I was only 19 years old, and I had four technicians working for me, helping with the construction of that computer. The computer used approximately 1,000 logic gates, made with germanium transistors (fabricated in Italy by SGS-Fairchild), housed in a couple of hundred small printed circuit boards. Silicon transistors would have been faster, but they were too expensive, and integrated circuits (ICs) had just been invented and were not yet commercially available.