The Surprising Story of the First Microprocessors (2016)

I had to use my KVM switch to come from the work Arm Mac to the home X86 Windows to write this comment in a truly dynastic x86 processor.

> So if you’re sitting at a PC with an x86 processor right now, you’re using a computer based on a design that dates all the way back to Datapoint’s 2200 programmable terminal of 1969.

I wasn't born back then, but my parents were. They were younger than I'm now; five decades and half are a long time for our short lifespans but nothing even when considering just written history.

I liked computers from a young age, and followed their development in (by then old) encyclopedias from the sixties, Byte magazines that found their way to my communist homeland, and MSX-Basic computers in primary schools that must have costed an eye and a leg to the eternally destitute communist government.

The world has changed a lot in five decades, and while you can focus on all the politics and the geopolitics, I would go out on a limb and say that microprocessors are what have changed the every-day experience to people the most. In the same breath, I'm going to add that I don't think we have seen the half of it yet. The next two to three decades will be really eventful.

I like this article because it pushes back on the "the victors get to write history" Intel narrative. Also nice that it's not entirely US-centric, mentioning Pico and GI albeit in passing. My Dad knew some of those folks through his role teaching electronics at the local college, and I rode the train to school with some of their kids. I didn't realize at the time that they were so cool.

Related:

The Surprising Story of the First Microprocessors (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28548353 - Sept 2021 (67 comments)

The Story of the First Microprocessors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12398451 - Aug 2016 (20 comments)

Alexander the ok did a fairly detailed video on this a few days ago [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/YpruA5mC7wg?si=nQdHoak_5grmiepg