This Is Not a Computer: Negotiating the Microprocessor

The Intel 4004 μ-Computer is the earliest known microprocessor-based hardware distributed by Intel. This article relates the information concerning the 4004 μ-Computer in an effort to gain a more complete historical perspective on the liminal period in the corporate history of Intel when, soon after the introduction of its first microprocessor, the company was wrestling with the "one-chip CPU--computer or component?" dilemma and tried to position itself in the emerging microcomputing market that it helped to create.

1 The 4004 Prototyping Boards

Intel was incorporated in june 1968 as a semiconductor memory company. In less than three years, the company became a major supplier of semiconductor memory devices and systems. It also put rudimentary CPU circuitry on a single chip destined for Busicom calculators. The Intel 4004 chip was the first commercially available microprocessor. It was originally designed as the CPU of a four-chip family, the MCS-4, consisting, in addition to the CPU, of a 4001 ROM, a 4002 RAM, and a 4003 shift register. In mid-1971, Intel acquired the nonexclusivity rights to the 4004 CPU with some reluctance on the part of its management and marketing department and under pressure from engineers who were working on the microprocessor and wanted to see it in the marketplace.^[8]