Heroes of the circuit

Who built the first microprocessor? While the term was coined in 1968, the product it referred to wasn’t a chip but a mini-computer. Several American groups vie for the title of first chip. By 1969-70, a firm called Four-Phase Systems had segmented chips into 8-bit hunks to build the 24-bit AL1. But it was involved in a patent dispute that was settled out of court, so we’ll never know it if was really them.

The Central Air Data Computer firm built a 6-chip set for the US Navy’s fighter jets, but civilians couldn’t access it and it didn’t form the basis of any of the early publicly available applications, so it’s generally believed it doesn’t count either.

Texas Instruments launched the chip in a calculator but not as a stand-alone. In Scotland, Pico Electronics and General Instruments built a calculator chip that included CPU, ROM and RAM but it wasn’t sold to the public. Meanwhile…

1969

Japan’s Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation asked Intel to design 12 custom chips for its new Busicom 141-PF printing calculator. Engineers suggested a family of just four chips, including one that could be programmed for use in a variety of products. They persuaded Busicom to allow them to let them sell the chip commercially. But even Intel didn’t know what was to come.

1971

That 4-chip processor, the 4004, was commercially launched, essentially putting a programmable computer on a microchip the size of a fingernail. Customers would get the same computing power as from a computer built in 1946, which used to fill an entire room. The chip became a building block for a variety of devices. One sample is on display at the Intel museum in California.

1972

Intel improved the chip, coming out with the faster, cheaper 8008. Who’d really want a microprocessor, though? Chips typically powered calculators, cash registers, giant computer terminals and industrial robots. Intel’s marketing executives estimated they’d sell 2,000 a year. One engineer built a video game, Space War, using the chip. Intel thought there was no market for such a goofy application.

1973

Maybe those chips could power a computer small enough for a home? Personal computers, running on the 8008 chip and targeted at hobbyists, started to appear. Tech magazines wrote about what the chip could do. People got excited. Sales picked up.

1974

All hail the 8080. Geeks loved the “eightyeighty” because the new design was sleeker than the 8008, but could perform 2.9 lakh operations per second. It was among the many new chips being made by Siemens, Mitsubishi and the Czech company Tesla. And it powered the Altair 8800, a $400 mail-order build-it-yourself device that became the first commercially successful personal computer. Back at Intel, the chip recovered its R&D costs in just five months. Management was thinking, maybe they should stop being just a memory chip company and pivot to dealing in programmable chips.

1975

Bill Gates and Paul Allen started a little company called Micro-Soft (from “Microprocessors” and “Software”) to produce programmes for the Altair 8800. The company eventually dropped the hyphen. And went on to make Gates the world’s youngest billionaire, in 1987, at age 31.

1976

Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak built a homemade computer, the Apple I, with more memory, a cheaper microprocessor than the Altair, plus a monitor with a screen, rather than bulky toggle switches. The following year’s launch, the Apple II, had a keyboard, a colour screen and data storage on cassette tape. Programmes for spreadsheets made them a practical tool for businesses.

1978

Microchip-controlled washing machines entered the market. The public loved the idea of “automatic” devices that came with various settings, activated by the touch of a button. They were smaller, faster, cheaper and the cutting edge of consumer tech.

1980

Microprocessors got a high score! The chip-powered arcade game Pac-Man sparked a worldwide craze. The coming decade would bring Casio Databank watches, the Gameboy, VHS and Betamax tape players, multi-function TV remote controls, digital toys and automatic safety features in cars.

1982

Time magazine named the personal computer “Man of the Year”. This was the first time that a non-human recipient has been selected for the honour. Geeks the world over rejoiced.

1985

Home PCs now ran Windows, the Microsoft operating system. But a computer still cost the earth. The Cray 2, the most powerful machine of the time, had roughly the same computing power as today’s iPad 2, but cost $35 million. 1984:

Alien director Ridley Scott created the now-famous ad for the Macintosh 128K, a home computer in the monitor-keyboard-mouse configuration, so named because it ran on 128K of RAM. It had a 9-inch CRT monitor, single-sided floppy disk drive and featured a handle on the top that meant it could be moved from place to place. It was a huge hit in America.

Closer home, Minicomp became the first company to launch a PC in India, the Neptune. Some 1,200 Neptunes were sold in the first year, mostly to engineers, but the company folded, amid heightened competition.

1989

Processing power needs huge amounts of data and those flimsy floppy drives and magnetic tapes just wouldn’t do anymore. A factory manager at Toshiba invented flash memory drives. Toshiba did nothing. So he presented his design at a conference and Intel picked up the idea. Toshiba would eventually begin to market them too.

1991

New players such as AMD improved on microprocessor tech, making it cheaper and more versatile. Camcorders, flip phones, palm pilots, Discmans and virtual pets, aka tamagochis, brought more tech into domestic life.

1995

Microprocessors are small, portable, expensive and easy to resell. So robbing them became the crime of the 1990s. In California, an organised gang of 13 welldressed thieves entered an electronics store and made off with $5 million in computer chips

and memory boards.

2005

While tech made itself at home, homes started going smart, using web-enabled devices and programs that could communicate with each other. Thumb drives, MP3 players, the Xbox and digital cameras were the musthave gadgets of the decade.

1999

RIM introduced the Blackberry 850. The 32-bit processor and 2 MB memory kickstarted the smartphone revolution. By 2007, the iPhone would improve on the design, replacing the buttons with an edge-too-edge touchscreen that has become standard across all brands.

1992

The PC got more personal. IBM’s ThinkPad 700c line of laptops challenged the dominance of Apple and Compaq with large displays, colour screens and powerful processors. The design set the template for workhorses to come.

2016

Google announced that it would start making its own chip, the Tensor Processing Unit, specifically for neural network machine learning. The future, it seemed, belonged to artificial intelligence — bots examining large swathes of data — and microprocessors had to step up.

2018

One to call our own. A team from IIT-Madras designed and developed Shakti, India’s first indigenous microprocessor based on existing architecture. It had been in the works since 2011 and is one of the few open-source microprocessors in the world, geared for use specifically in low-power wireless networks, mobile phones and

other devices.

2021

Today, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, Japan’s Fugaku computing cluster, has a 48-core CPU (most laptops today use four or eight cores). Like other supercomputers around the world, it has been deployed to study how the Covid-19 virus behaves and how to counter it. Home PCs now top out at 12- and 16-core CPUs. Their most eager fans: gamers.

2020

Apple and Microsoft announced plans to build their own chips in-house. India released another local processor. IITMadras’s Moushik can be used in credit cards, commuting passes, voting machines, camera, smart locks and IoT devices.

2019

And the race is on. IIT-Bombay developed Ajit, the first processor to be conceptualised, designed, developed and manufactured in India. Where the Shakti is tiny, the Ajit is designed for larger systems like robots, automation systems, servers and eventually satellites.