The First Microprocessor, the F-14, and Me
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The book "Aces Wild" [1] says that it was unofficially broken before that in an XP-86 (The experimental F-86, a jet powered fighter) in a dive, and witnesses on the ground heard sonic booms before Yeager's flight that day. But history favors the hero's, and in this case, the science: We know 100% for sure, because of science, that Yeager officially broke the sound barrier first.
It is quite possible that the F-86 test pilots who stuck their planes in a dive likely did it first. It is well documented that the F-86 was capable of Mach 1 in a dive. Even so, that's not what the history books say, so that's not what we teach kids in school. I suspect it'll always be the same with the F14 computer vs the Intel 4004.
[1] https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/mach-1-whoduni...
The point of the X-1 has always been that it was the first human piloted plane that broke the sound barrier in level, controlled, and repeatable flight.
Aerospace engineer and amateur WWII historian here: I'm not aware of any credible claims from that era. The only WWII-era claims to have broken the sound barrier (by piloted craft) I've seen can be attributed to poor pitot tube design which gives erroneously high indicated airspeed readings when the ram pressure gets high enough.
A reconnaissance Spitfire I believe is what got closest, at something like .9 of Mach measured by a fancy pitot system at the RAF test establishment.
Shock waves develop inside the pitot tube under certain conditions, and that causes a spike (or sometimes a drop) in pressure which is interpreted by the instrument as a corresponding rise or drop in airspeed.
Edit: as for the 262 claim itself it was pretty handily debunked in a post-war NACA technical note. If you dig around on the NTRS you can find it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Guido_Mutke
In other words, it's the same problem that the piston-engined aircraft of the time had: Anomalous readings at high speed.
For an airplane to reach Mach 1, this mainly requires thin wings and enough power/dive. To control it, you need a flying tail, and swept wings and "waisting" the fuselage reduces the amount of power needed.
So almost all of the planes in WW2 were "too thick" and incapable of supersonic flight, though could have exceeded Mach 1 with modified wings, tail and in a dive.
The US P-80 (1945) and F-86 (1949) jets had underpowered engines, in the sense that all early jet engines had limited power.
However the F-86 had swept wings, and later versions of the F-86 had a flying tail, so if you pointed it at the ground, you could get a sonic boom without losing control.
Source: I study aerodynamics.
Creating a sonic boom in a deep and dangerous dive is an interesting quirk in a fighter, but it doesn’t set new speed records that would interest the general population.
Yes, it was. Betteridge's Law strikes again.
This is a super cool, and very personal, story about a massive advance in VLSI avionics. Compare it to the System 4pi, or the value-based avionics of the Soviets. There were lots of other approaches, and this one was more sophisticated and yet less expensive. It’s a great achievement!
However, it is not, in any way, a story about a microprocessor.
The only interesting thing about the Intel 4004 is that it fit general purpose computing into a single chip package. Many people and companies did interesting things long before the 4004 with a relatively small number of components, but that number was not one.
The simple existence of a chip like the 4004, as a commercial product, altered an entire industry, globally. It gave rise to the Intel 8000 series, the Motorola 6800 series, and hundreds of clones.
Ultimately, the revolution kicked off by the microprocessor gave us microcomputers, the rise of CMOS, and, essentially, the end of all other architectures for computing.
This story is super cool but some editor fucked up real bad with the headline. This wonderful early application of VLSI and software in avionics is amazing, but it isn’t connected to the story of the “microprocessor,” as a thing.
P.S. even if you accept the premise that an ALU on a chip is a cool advance, it didn’t go anywhere! No one could buy the damn chip. Nothing ever came of it outside avionics contractors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Iranian_aerial_victori...
The US refused to export the TomCat to any other country and they destroyed all remaining TomCats after retiring them to prevent Iran from accessing spare parts, vs just having them parked in bone yards like other fighter jets.
https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=5e448196-42ac-41ba-81b8-b7272...
3 of them visible here, in various states of wing sweep.
I read that they want to buy Flankers, but I would assume that western coverage of Iranian military strategy probably isn't particularly accurate.
If you're a flight and space geek like me, you'll spend a day or two at KSC and then a full day at the warbird museum. Whenever I find myself in Florida I try to make my way out there, can't recommend it enough!
Likewise there's usually an interrupt controller of some sort, and a timer, and technically a processor can process without these, but it's not terribly useful in the real world. But because an interrupt controller in particular tends to have quite a few I/O pins, it's often in a separate package from the ALU, and you can pick larger or smaller interrupt controllers (or chain several together) depending on the application. But these are typically designed as a "family", and are always found together.
Atop all that, you generally need some ROM to boot the thing, and probably some glue logic (muxes and decoders) to perform memory mapping, etc. And then main system RAM itself. These are generic enough that they may or may not be considered part of the "family" with the processor.
Previously, the ALU would've been an entire board full of SSI chips, or a whole shelf of modules stuffed with individual discretes. And the register file would be another board, or a shelf thereof. And interrupts and glue would be all over the place, and peripherals getting into the mix... None of those boards was useful without the others, so they were always found together. Putting each of those functions onto a single chip instead of a whole board is what made it "micro", even if it was always found with the rest of its family.
Today, we have a term "microcontroller", for something that integrates the whole shebang: ALU, registers, RAM, ROM, interrupt controller, clock and timer, and I/O peripherals, into a single chip. It does processing, so you could consider it a microprocessor, but it has basically the whole rest of everything in there too (everything but power, typically). The term "microprocessor" does not go as far.
Then we realized it will continue to get smaller and after nano it will sound stupid so we stopped
As in, not like what the F-14 had.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/ch...
> The Intel 4004 was the world’s first microprocessor—a complete general-purpose CPU on a single chip.
https://firstmicroprocessor.com/?doing_wp_cron=1608857321.86...
Pity this was kept secret and only ever saw military use. Sounds like a very advanced processor.
Also, the military (for the most part) pays for these inventions, the actual research and manufacture is usually still done in the private sector. That doesn't have to be the case, but if we take the Soviet Union as an example of an alternate system (Basically state-owned design Bureaus) they could just about keep up with the pace of technological development (and match in limited scope) but their populaces didn't see the "trickle down" technology.
Instead of state we have state based capitalism. Instead of innovation by state, we have private firms which can steal from other countries freely as they are not military. And they can produce well as well. And they can go out to sell you things and selective let you in for helping in the copying.
That is Soviet Union 2.0 - china.
Garrett AiResearch appears to have been a private company
The Tomcat is an absolute beast, though, so be prepared to be reading an instruction manual just to play a game if you want to go all out.
Also, to anyone who goes on DCS multiplayer for the first time: IFF IFF IFF.
Beware though, this addiction leads to things like buying entire hotas setups from companies like Virpil and VKB and that's a very pricey proposition.
In short, increasingly well modelled but ultimately only an abstraction due to some fairly obvious reasons. The JF-17 apparently has the best IFF model in the game but I only started flying it yesterday.
I'm sorry, but that incorrect usage really jumped out at me.
Great article, though.