Chip Hall of Fame: Motorola MC68000 Microprocessor
The rays of the rising sun have barely reached the foothills of Silicon Valley, but Marcian E. (Ted) Hoff Jr. is already up to his elbows in electronic parts, digging through stacks of dusty circuit boards. This is the monthly flea market at Foothill College, and he rarely misses it.
Ted Hoff is part of electronics industry legend. While a research manager at Intel Corp., then based in Mountain View, he realized that silicon technology had advanced to the point that, with careful engineering, a complete central processor could fit on a chip. Teaming up with Stanley Mazor and Federico Faggin, he created the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004.
This article was first published as “Marcian E Hoff.” It appeared in the February 1994 issue of IEEE Spectrum. A PDF version is available on IEEE Xplore. The photographs appeared in the original print version.
But for Hoff, the microprocessor was merely one blip among many along the tracing of his long fascination with electronics. His passion for the field led him from New York City’s used electronics stores to elite university laboratories, through the intense early years of the microprocessor revolution and the tumult of the video game industry, and ultimately to his job today: high-tech private eye.
Fairly early in his childhood Hoff figured out that the best way to feel less like a kid—and a little more powerful—was to understand how things work. He started his explorations with chemistry. By the age of 12 he had moved on to electronics, building things with parts ordered from an Allied Radio Catalog, a shortwave radio kit, and surplus relays and motors salvaged from the garbage at his father’s employer, General Railway Signal Co., in Rochester, NY. Then in high school, working mostly with secondhand components, he built an oscilloscope, an achievement he parlayed into a technician’s job at General Railway Signal.
Hoff returned to that job during breaks from his undergraduate studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.
Y. Several summers began with Hoff entering the General Railway laboratory to find the researchers’ two best oscilloscopes broken. He would repair the state-of-the-art Tektronix 545s, then move on to more interesting stuff, like inventing an audio frequency railroadtrain tracking circuit and a lightning protection unit that gave him two patents before he was out of his teens.
The best thing about the job, Hoff recalled, was the access it gave him to components that were beyond the budgets of most engineering students in the l950s—transistors, for instance, and even the just-introduced power transistor. He did an undergraduate thesis on transistors used as switches, and the cash prize he won for it quickly went for a Heathkit scope of his own.
Early Neural Networks
Hoff liked the engineering courses at Rensselaer, but not the narrow focus of the college itself. He wanted to broaden his perspective, both intellectually and geographically (he had never been more than a few miles west of Niagara Falls), so chose California’s Stanford University for graduate school.
While working toward his Ph.D. there, he did research in adaptive systems (which today are called neural networks) and, with his thesis advisor Bernard Widrow, racked up two more patents.
“He had a toy train moving back and forth under computer control, balancing a broom stick. I saw him as a kooky inventor, a mad scientist.”
—Stanley Mazor
His Intel colleague Mazor, now training manager at Synopsys Inc., Mountain View, Calif., recalled meeting Hoff in his Stanford laboratory.
“He had a toy train moving back and forth under computer control, balancing a broomstick,” Mazor said. “I saw him as a kooky inventor, a mad scientist.”
After getting his degree, Hoff stayed at Stanford for six more years as a postdoctoral researcher, continuing the work on neural networks. At first, his group made the networks trainable by using a device whose resistance changed with the amount and direction of current applied. It consisted of a pencil lead and a piece of copper wire sitting in a copper sulfate and sulfuric acid solution, and they called it a memistor.
“One result of all our work on microprocessors that has always pleased me is that we got computers away from those [computer center] people.”
—Ted Hoff
The group soon acquired an IBM 1620 computer, and Hoff had his first experience in programming—and in bucking the system. He had to deal with officials at the campus computer center who thought all computers should be in one place, run by specialists who handled the boxes of punched cards delivered by researchers. The idea that a researcher should program computer systems interactively was anathema to them.
Ted Hoff: Vital Stats
Name
Marcian E. (Ted) Hoff Jr.
Date of birth
Oct. 28, 1937
Family
Wife, Judy; three daughters, Carolyn, Lisa, and Jill
Education
BS, 1958, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y.; MS, 1959, Ph.D., 1962, Stanford University, California, all in electrical engineering
First job
Planting cabbages
First electronics job
Technician, General Railway Signal Co.
, Rochester, N.Y.
Biggest surprise in career
Media hysteria over the microprocessor
Patents
17
Books recently read
Introduction to Nuclear Reactor Theory by John R. Lamarsh; A Compiler Generator by William M. McKeeman, James J. Horning, and David B. Wortman
People most respected
Intel Corp. founders Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, Intel chief executive officer Andrew Grove
Favorite restaurants
Postrio and Bella Voce in San Francisco, Beausejour in Los Altos, Calif.
Favorite movies
2001, Dr. Strangelove
Motto
“If it works, it’s aesthetic”
Leisure activities
Playing with electronics; attending operas and concerts; going to the theater, body surfing in Hawaii; walking his Alaskan malamutes
Car
Porsche 944
Management creed
“The best motivation is self-motivation”
Organizational memberships
IEEE, Sigma Xi
Major awards
Stuart Balantine Medal of the Franklin Institute, IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award, IEEE Centennial Medal, IEEE Fellow
“One result of all our work on microprocessors that has always pleased me,” Hoff told IEEE Spectrum, “is that we got computers away from those people.
”
By 1968 student hostility to the government over the Vietnam War was growing and life for researchers on campus who, like Hoff, relied on government funding was looking as if it might get uncomfortable. Hoff had already been contemplating the possibilities of industrial jobs when he received a telephone call from Robert Noyce, who told him he was starting a new company, Intel Corp., and had heard Hoff might be interested in a job. He asked Hoff where the semiconductor integrated circuit business would find its next growth area. “Memories,” Hoff replied.
That was the answer Noyce had in mind (Intel was launched as a memory manufacturer), and that year he hired Hoff as a member of the technical staff, Intel’s 12th employee. Working on memory technology, Hoff soon received a patent for a cell for use in MOS random-access integrated circuit memory. Moving on to become manager of applications research, he had the first customer contact of his career.
“Engineering people tend to have a very haughty attitude toward marketing, but I discovered you learn a tremendous amount if you keep your eyes and ears open in the field.
”
—Hoff
“Engineering people tend to have a very haughty attitude toward marketing,” Hoff said, “but I discovered you learn a tremendous amount if you keep your eyes and ears open in the field. Trying to understand what problems people are trying to solve is very helpful. People back in the lab who don’t have that contact are working at a disadvantage.”
From 12 Chips to One Microprocessor
One group of customers with whom Hoff made contact were from Busicom Corp., Tokyo. Busicom had hired Intel to develop a set of custom chips for a low-cost calculator and had sent three engineers to Santa Clara to work on the chip designs. Hoff was assigned to look after them, getting them pencils and paper, showing them where the lunchroom was—nothing technical.
But the technical part of Hoff’s mind has no off-switch, and he quickly concluded that the engineers were going in the wrong direction. Twelve chips, each with more than 3000 transistors and 36 leads, were to handle different elements of the calculator logic and controls, and he surmised the packaging alone would cost more than the targeted retail price of the calculator.
Hoff was struck by the complexity of this tiny calculator, compared with the simplicity of the PDP-8 minicomputer he was currently using in another project, and he concluded that a simple computer that could handle the functions of a calculator could be designed with about 1900 transistors. Given Intel’s advanced MOS process, all these, he felt, could fit on a single chip.
Marcian E. «Ted» Hoff
The Busicom engineers had no interest in dumping their design in favor of Hoff’s unproved proposal. But Hoff, with Noyce’s blessing, started working on the project. Soon Mazor, then a research engineer at Intel, joined him, and the two pursued Hoff’s ideas, developing a simple instruction set that could be implemented with about 2000 transistors. They showed that the one set of instructions could handle decimal addition, scan a keyboard, maintain a display, and perform other functions that were allocated to separate chips in the Busicom design.
In October 1969, Hoff, Mazor, and the three Japanese engineers met with Busicom management, visiting from Japan, and described their divergent approaches.
Busicom’s managers chose Hoff’s approach, partly, Hoff said, because they understood that the chip could have varied applications beyond that of a calculator. The project was given the internal moniker “4004.”
Federico Faggin, now president and chief executive officer of Synaptics Inc., San Jose, Calif., was assigned to design the chip, and in nine months came up with working prototypes of a 4-bit, 2300-transistor “microprogrammable computer on a chip.” Busicom received its first shipment of the devices in February 1971.
Faggin recalled that when he began implementing the microprocessor, Hoff seemed to have lost interest in the project, and rarely interacted with him. Hoff was already working on his next project, the preliminary design of an 8-bit microprogrammable computer for Computer Terminals Corp., San Antonio, Texas, which, architected by Computer Terminals, was named the 8008. Hoff always “had to do very cutting-edge work,” Faggin told Spectrum. “I could see a tension in him to always be at the forefront of what was happening.
”
In those early Intel days, Mazor recalled that Hoff had a number of ideas for projects, many of which, though not commercially successful, proved prescient: a RAM chip that would act like a digital camera and capture an image in memory, a video game with moving spaceships, a device for programming erasable programmable ROMs, and computer-aided design tools intended for logic simulation.
The Intel marketing department they estimated that sales [of microprocessors] might total only 2000 chips a year.
Meanwhile, the microprocessor revolution was gearing up, albeit slowly. Hoff joined Faggin as a microprocessor evangelist, trying to convince people that general-purpose one chip computers made sense. Hoff said his toughest sell was to the Intel marketing department.
“They were rather hostile to the idea,” he recalled, for several reasons. First, they felt that all the chips Intel could make would go for several years to one company, so there was little point in marketing them to others.
Second, they told Hoff, ‘‘We have diode salesman out there struggling like crazy to sell memories, and you want them to sell computers? You’re crazy.” And finally, they estimated that sales might total only 2000 chips a year.
But word went out. In May 1971 an article in Datamation magazine mentioned the product, and the following November Intel produced its first ad for the 4004 CPU and placed it in Electronic News. By 1972 stories about the miracle of what began being called the microprocessor started appearing regularly in the press, and Intel’s competitors followed its lead by launching microprocessor products of their own.
Hoff never even considered patenting the microprocessor. To him the invention seemed to be obvious.
One step Hoff did not take at that time was apply for a patent, even though he had already successfully patented several inventions. (Later, with Mazor and Faggin he filed for and was granted a patent for a “memory system for a multi-chip digital computer.
”)
Looking back, Hoff recalled that he never even considered patenting the microprocessor in those days. To him the invention seemed to be obvious, and obviousness was considered grounds for rejecting a patent application (though, Hoff said bitterly, the patent office currently seems to ignore that rule). It was obvious to Hoff that if in one year a computer could be built with 1000 circuits on100 chips, and if in the following year those 1000 circuits could be put onto10 chips, eventually those 1000 circuits could be con structed on one chip.
Instead of patenting, Hoff in March 1970 published an article in the proceedings of the 1970 IEEE International Convention that stated: “An entirely new approach to design of very small computers is made possible by the vast circuit complexity possible with MOS technology. With from 1000 to 6000 MOS devices per chip, an entire central processor may be fabricated on a single chip.”
But in December 1970, an independent inventor outside the cliquish semiconductor industry, Gilbert Hyatt, filed for a patent on a processor and mentioned that it was to be made on a single chip.
In 1990, after numerous appeals and extensions, Hyatt was granted that patent and began collecting royalties from many microprocessor manufacturers. Currently, though history traces today’s microprocessor back to Hoff, Mazor, and Faggin, the legal rights to the invention belong to Hyatt.
The Invention of the Codec
While the microprocessor has proved to be his most celebrated achievement, Hoff does not view it as his biggest technical breakthrough. That designation he reserves for the single-chip analog-to-digital/ digital-to-analog coder/decoder (codec).
“Now that work was an exciting technical challenge,” Hoff recollected with some glee, “because there were so many who said it couldn’t be done.”
The project was kicked off by Noyce, who spotted the telephone industry as ripe for new technology, and urged Hoff to find an important product for that market. Studying telephone communications, Hoff and several other researchers saw that digitized voice transmission, then being used between central offices, depended on the use of complex expensive codecs that tied into electromechanical switches.
”We thought,” Hoff told Spectrum, “we could integrate this, the analog-to-digital conversion, on a chip, and then use these circuits as the basis for switching.”
Besides reducing the cost of the systems to the telephone company, such chips would enable companies to build small branch exchanges that handled switching electronically.
Hoff and his group developed a multiplexed approach to conversion in which a single converter is shared by the transmit and receive channels. They also established a number of other techniques for conversion and decoding that Hoff saw as not being obvious and for which he received patents.
With that project’s completion in 1980, after six years of effort, and its transfer to Intel’s manufacturing facility in Chandler, Ariz., Hoff became an Intel Fellow, free to pursue whatever technology interested him. What interested him was returning to his work on adaptive structures, combining the concepts he had wrestled with at Stanford with the power of the microprocessor in the service of speech recognition.
After a year he built a recognition system that Intel marketed for several years.
A prime customer for the system was the automotive industry. Its inspectors used the systems to help them check out a car as it finally left the assembly line. When an inspector noted out loud various problems that needed fixing, the system would prompt him for further information, and log his responses in a computer.
From Intel to Atari
Though his position as an Intel Fellow gave Hoff a fair amount of freedom, he found himself getting bored. Intel’s success in microprocessors by 1983 had turned it into a chip supplier, and other companies were designing the chips into systems.
“I had always been more interested in systems than in chips,” Hoff said, “and I had been at Intel for 14 years, at a time when the average stay at a company in Silicon Valley was three years. I was overdue for a move.”
Again, Hoff had not gone beyond thinking about leaving Intel when a new job came to him.
Atari Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., then a booming video game company owned by Warner Communications Inc. and a major user of microprocessors, was looking for a vice president of corporate technology. In February 1983, after discussing the scope of the ideas that Atari researchers were pursuing, Hoff latched onto the opportunity.
Intel from the start had a structured, highly controlled culture. At Atari, chaos reigned.
Intel from the start had a structured, highly controlled culture. At Atari, chaos reigned. Under Hoff were research laboratories in Sunnyvale, Los Angeles, and Grass Valley, Calif.; Cambridge, Mass.; and New York City. Researchers were working on picture telephones, electronic aids for joggers, computer controls that gave tactile feedback, graphical environments akin to today’s virtual reality, digital sound synthesis, advanced personal computers, and software distribution via FM sidebands.
But Hoff had barely had time to learn about all the research projects under way before the video game business took a well-publicized plunge.
Without solid internal controls, Atari was unable to determine how well its games were selling at the retail point, and distributors were returning hundreds of thousands of cartridges and game machines. Hoff began receiving orders for staff cuts monthly.
“It would have been one thing if I had known I had to cut back to, say, one-quarter the size of my group,” he told Spectrum. “But when every month you find you have to cut another chunk, morale really drops.”
In July 1984, while Hoff was at his 30th high school reunion, Warner sold Atari to Jack Tramiel. Hoff then had to choose between convincing Tramiel that he could play a role in a narrowly focused company uninterested in funding futuristic research, and allowing Warner to buy out his contract. He chose the latter.
Looking back, most of the people who were at Atari in those days now view them darkly. But Hoff recalls his year there as an enjoyable and ultimately useful experience. “Maybe I look at it more positively than I should,” he said, “but it turned out to be a good transition for me, and the life I have now is a very nice one.
”
“Whenever you are working on one problem, there is always another problem over here that seems more interesting.”
—Hoff
He now spends half his time as a consultant and half pursuing technical projects of his own devising—a readout device for machine tools, various types of frame grabbers, pattern recognition, and techniques for analog-to-digital conversion. This variegated schedule is perfect for him. He has always felt himself to be a generalist, and has had trouble focusing on just one technology.
“It’s easy for me to get distracted,” he said. “Whenever you are working on one problem, there is always another problem over here that seems more interesting. But now it is more likely that my own projects get delayed, rather than things critical to other people and their employment.”
Faggin for one is not surprised that such independent work appeals to Hoff. “He never was the gregarious type,” Faggin said. “He liked introverted work, the thinking, the figuring out of new things.
That is what he is good at. I always was impressed how he was able to visualize an architecture for a new IC, practically on the spot.”
“He comes up with idea after idea, situation after situation. I think if he wanted to, Ted could sit down and crank out a patent a month.”
—Gary Summers
Said Gary Summers, president and chief executive officer of Teklicon Inc., Mountain View, the consulting firm that employs Hoff today: “He comes up with idea after idea, situation after situation. I think if he wanted to, Ted could sit down and crank out a patent a month.”
“There is no doubt in my mind that he is a genius,” Mazor stated. Summers readily concurred.
Hoff’s first project after Atari was a voicecontrolled music synthesizer, which gave off the sound of a selected instrument when someone sang into it. Hoff’s biggest contribution to the project was a system that ensured that the emerging notes would be in tune, or at least harmonically complement the tune, even when the singer strayed off key.
He scored another patent for this system, and the gadget was sold briefly through the Sharper Image catalog, but never became a big success.
Hoff still contributes occasionally to product designs. At Teklicon, however, where he is vice president and chief technical officer, most of his consulting is done for lawyers. Hoff has a unique combination of long experience with electronic design and long-standing pack rat habits. His home workshop contains about eight personal computers of different makes and vintages, five oscilloscopes, including a vintage Tektronix 545 scope, 15000 ICs inventoried and filed, and shelves loaded with IC data books dating right back to the 1960s.
“If my washing machine breaks down, I call the repairman. Most clever engineers would buy the replacement gear and install it. Ted is capable of analyzing the reason the gear failed in the first place, redesigning a better gear from basic principles, carving it out of wood, casting it at his home, and dynamically balancing it on his lathe before installing it.
”
—Mazor
When a lawyer shows him a patent disclosure, even one decades old, he can determine whether or not it could then have been “reduced to practice” and whether it provided sufficient information to allow “one of ordinary skill in the art” to practice the invention. Then he can build a model proving his conclusion, using vintage components from his collection, and demonstrate the model in court as an expert witness. This model-building can get very basic. On Spectrum’s visit, Rochelle salt crystals that Hoff attempted to grow for a recent court demonstration littered his workshop floor, next to metal-working equipment that he uses to build cases for his models.
Hoff sees this ability to get down to basics as one of his strengths. “I relate things to fundamental principles,” he said. “People who don’t question the assumptions made going into a problem often end up solving the wrong problem.”
Mazor said, “If my washing machine breaks down, I call the repairman.
Most clever engineers would buy the replacement gear and install it. Ted is capable of analyzing the reason the gear failed in the first place, redesigning a better gear from basic principles, carving it out of wood, casting it at his home, and dynamically balancing it on his lathe before installing it.”
Doing legal detective work appeals to Hoff for another reason: it gives him an excuse to hunt for interesting “antique” components at flea markets and electronics stores.
Hoff cannot discuss the specifics of patent cases he has been involved with. Several recently were in the video game area; others have involved various IC companies. In a number of cases, Hoff was confident that his side was right, and his side still lost, so he felt little surprise when the microprocessor patent was granted to Hyatt. (After the award was made, though, he did sit down with Hyatt’s patent application and attempted to design a working microprocessor based on Hyatt’s disclosures. He found several incongruities—like a clock rate only suited to bipolar technology with logic that could only be rendered in MOS technology, and logic that required far too many transistors to put on a chip, proving in his mind that the award was incorrect.
)
Seeing someone else get credit for the microprocessor, particularly in recent media reports, “is irritating,” Hoff told Spectrum, “but I’m not going to let it bother me, because I know what I did, I know what all the other people on our project did, and I know what kind of company Intel is. And I know that I was where the action was.”
Editor’s note: Hoff retired from Teklicon in 2007. He currently serves as a judge for the Collegiate Inventors Competition, held annually by the National Inventors Hall of Fame. These days, his main technical interests surround energy, water, and climate change.
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new microprocessor from Intel and exit of the Motorola brand from the market
February 23, 2017
04:00
Straight to the top.
Which of the Russian technologies interested the world’s largest developer and manufacturer of microprocessors? How does this relate to the errors of the IT giant? What great brand seems to be finally leaving the mobile market? More about this in the Vesti.net program.
Straight to the top. Which of the Russian technologies interested the world’s largest developer and manufacturer of microprocessors? How does this relate to the errors of the IT giant? What great brand seems to be finally leaving the mobile market? More about this in the Vesti.net program.
Intel bought the Russian-Indian startup Soft Machines. The team of the acquired company will develop the next generation processor. The estimated amount of the deal is $250 million.
Soft Machines’ investors include Samsung Ventures, AMD, as well as Russian funds — Rusnano and RVC.
Information about the deal emerged after a meeting between Intel’s management and investors, where details were given about the takeovers made by the company in 2016.
Soft Machines is a startup developing microprocessors of its own architecture that can be used in the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile communications and cloud computing markets.
The company’s key development is the «software virtualization layer» — a technology that allows you to run programs written for the ARM and x86 architectures without their additional modification.
«Software virtualization» was created in the Russian division of Soft Machines. Judging by reports from a number of sources, the Russian team will now become the core of the Intel division responsible for developing the next generation processor. Until recently, Intel had two «processor divisions» — in the US and in Israel.
Intel, which was late to the explosion in the popularity of mobile devices, lost the competition with the developers of energy-efficient ARM processors, which are found in almost every tablet and smartphone. Perhaps the introduction of a processor that combines the advantages of two main architectures and is able to work with applications written for them with equal efficiency will allow Intel to gain a foothold in the portable device market without losing its position in the PC market.
***
Lenovo is dropping the Motorola brand. The fact that the Chinese company wants to get away from the American «name» and leave only moto, the Russian office of Lenovo announced almost a year ago. However, the integration of the business of the mobile division of Lenovo with Motorola was just beginning and a joint development model was being developed. It has now become known that absolutely all the company’s smartphones will be sold under the Lenovo moto brand, and the production of phones under other names — including Vibe and Motorola — will be discontinued.
Recall that Lenovo bought Motorola Mobility from Google for nearly $3 billion in 2014. The fate of the Motorola brand itself after the merger with the Chinese company remained unknown for a long time. There were rumors that the brand would be abandoned, and new products would be released under the Lenovo name. But soon the company released two smartphones — Moto X and Moto G, which first appeared only in the United States, where the Motorola brand is still very popular.
At the same time, initially Motorola devices aimed at the premium segment, and Lenovo — at the lower and cheaper segment. And then the new owners promised that both brands would be present on the markets. It seems that the decision has been reconsidered in favor of creating a single brand, because the use of moto can bring Lenovo additional sales and customer loyalty. According to experts, such a move is typical of most Chinese companies operating in the international market. Lenovo moto is an attempt to blur its Chinese roots and position Lenovo as an international company in the smartphone market.
According to Gartner, Lenovo is not among the top five global smartphone vendors (3rd, 4th, and 5th are other Chinese companies such as Huawei and Oppo). In Russia, according to Vedomosti, Lenovo is in third place: the company’s share (without Motorola) in the domestic smartphone market in 2016 amounted to just over 8 percent in terms of the number of devices sold. The company was second only to Samsung (21.
6 percent of smartphone sales in Russia) and Apple (11.1 percent). Interestingly, among all Lenovo devices on the Russian market, there were less than one percent of devices under the Motorola brand.
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The inside story of Texas Instruments’ biggest bug, the TMS9900 microprocessor / Sudo Null IT News
If you are using a desktop or laptop computer, it probably has an Intel 808x microprocessor, whether the machine is running Windows or Mac. The absolute dominance of these microprocessors dates back to 1978, when IBM chose the 8088 for its first personal computer. But this choice was not at all obvious. Some believe that the Intel 8088 was the worst choice of 16-bit microprocessors available at the time.
No, it wasn’t the worst choice. He had a serious, but worse, alternative. I know this because I ran the organization that worked for TI that developed it: the TMS9900. Although this junk was used in the world’s first 16-bit home computer, you probably haven’t heard of it.
As they say, history is written by the winners.
This chapter of history is interesting not only for the chip from TI, but also for its other competitor, the Motorola 68000, technologically superior to both Intel 8088 and TMS9900. And yet 68000 did not make it to the IBM PC. And here’s a little-known story from well-informed sources about how IBM chose an underdeveloped chip, TI produced a loser, and the clear leader from Motorola lost.
In 1978, the author presented the TMS9900 chip, which was considered as a candidate for a personal computer from IBM. TI did not receive a contract.
I joined TI in 1972, right out of graduate school, and two years later I was making a presentation to Jack Karsten, manager of the MOS division in Houston, where the company’s work on metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) chips was based. . I, a young engineer, was somewhat timid in front of Jack, who sat through the entire presentation with his legs up on the conference room table, smoking a cigar and muttering “bullshit” every time he disagreed with something I said.
At the time, the big three semiconductor companies—Fairchild, Motorola, and TI—were trying to move from bipolar to MOS. MOS chips required a completely different design and manufacturing process, and start-ups like Intel grew much faster than existing companies. Of all the big three, TI was the best transitioner, thanks in large part to people like L.J. Sevin, who left TI in 1969 to found Mostek and later venture into venture capital. Karsten, who previously worked at TI as General Manager of the profitable Transistor-Transistor Logic (TTL) product line, was also a key person in the transition to MOS.
TI’s MOS division has achieved the most significant success in developing logic chips for the rapidly growing handheld calculator market. Although the company competed, and eventually beat Intel, in developing the first general-purpose processor, TI engineers were not particularly interested in Intel’s microprocessors (MPs), the 4-bit 4004 and 8-bit 8008. TI noticed the 8-bit 8080 microprocessors and the subsequent 8080A, because they were more promising than 4004.
The MOS department was tasked with catching up with Intel in both MP and DRAM (dynamic random access memory that can cram more memory cells onto a chip than RAM, but requires constant updating to prevent data loss ).
This is how TI came up with a general-purpose MP strategy. The key assumptions of the strategy were that application software would be the main driver for the evolution of these chips, and as the owner of the successful MOS IC line, TI would be in an excellent position to develop the industry standard for microcomputers, security systems and consumer products. All of these industries were rapidly growing sources of profit for the company. But to do this, TI had to jump over the current cutting-edge 8-bit development, exemplified by the Intel 8080, and become the first company to bring a 16-bit architecture to market. This strategy spawned the TMS9 plan900.
Winner: Intel’s 8088 microprocessors were far from ideal, but IBM chose them for its personal computer, which launched in 1981.
TI had already demonstrated its computer prowess in the supercomputer race in the late 1960s. The race was driven by oil companies trying to gain a competitive edge in 3D seismic analysis for oil exploration. TI was founded on this business. IBM, Control Data Corporation, and others competed in this race, but TI was the first to bring its Advanced Scientific Computer to market.
So for TI, choosing an architecture for a 16-bit chip was easy. TI had a «one company, one computer architecture» strategy to capitalize on the synergies that exist between different, disparate departments within the company. The Information Systems Division has already launched a family of TTL-based microcomputers for use in the Ramada Inn hotel chain throughout the United States. So the TMS9900 had to use an architecture very similar to TI’s microcomputer architecture.
Carsten’s team knew that the development of the TMS9900 — like the bipolar version for the military called the SBP9900 — would take time, and the chips would likely not be ready until 1975-1976.
At this time, the MOS branch needed to act. They planned to start by copying the Intel 8080A to bring something to market, then develop the original 8-bit microprocessor architecture (which would be called the TMS5500), and finally move on to the 16-bit TMS9900. National Semiconductor by that time had already released a 16-bit general-purpose logic chip set called the IMP-16, but due to the fact that it was a multi-chip set, it did not gain popularity.
The TMS9900 had its own baggage of development difficulties and delays, but it was finally ready by 1976. And yet he faced several major problems. First, there were no 16-bit peripheral chips compatible with it. And without peripheral chips working on data transmission and storage, MP will be useless for system development. The second problem was that the 9900 architecture, similar to what TI used in microcomputers, had only 16 bits of logical address space — just like the 8-bit processors of the time. This problem could not be solved without developing a new architecture from scratch.
The final problem was that while TI could use single-chip technology for its minicomputer, defense, and semiconductor businesses, its competitors in those industries would be at a disadvantage if they adopted TI’s architecture for their products.
Loser: Among the major problems that plagued the TMS9900 was the lack of 16-bit peripheral chips, rendering the MP useless in system development. Why not adapt an 8-bit port on the TMS9900 so that a large number of already existing peripheral chips designed for 8-bit MP can work with it? I’m sure it seemed reasonable at the time. As a result, at 1977 appeared TMS9980. Attaching an 8-bit peripheral to a 16-bit MP eliminated the only real benefit of the 16-bit architecture: speed. The 9980 required two instruction cycles to execute an instruction from an 8-bit peripheral, resulting in a two-fold drop in effective performance, which was no better than existing 8-bit MPs. Prior to TI’s grand plan, Carsten left the company to become VP of Sales and Marketing at Intel, feeling beyond any doubt that Intel would become a very formidable competitor that would be extremely difficult to beat in the MP market.
Intel naturally developed its own 16-bit microprocessor, the 8086, which saw the light of day in April 1978. The company approached the lack of compatible 16-bit peripherals in exactly the same way, adding an 8-bit port to the MP, which gave rise to the Intel 8088. Like the TI 9980, the Intel 8088 was junk, and showed reduced performance compared to the 8086 in any real system. But the Intel chip had one fundamental advantage over TI: 20 bits of logical address space instead of 16. As a result, it had the ability to access a megabyte of memory, and not 64K, like TI 9900. In addition, the external registers of the TMS9900 and 9980 worsened its performance even more.
And while Intel was successful in developing alternative sources of production for the 8086, TI was struggling to close similar deals. At the time, most customers needed at least two competing suppliers for each new family of semiconductor components to ensure the product was available at an affordable price.
Meanwhile, several competitors announced their plans for 16-bit general purpose processors. The most ambitious plan was the Motorola 68000. Although it had 16 external pins, its internal architecture was 32 bits and it had 24 bits for the logical address space. The next product might be able to use 32 address bits. Zilog, creator of the popular 8-bit Z80 MP, announced the development of a 16-bit Z8000 segmented-memory memory slated for release on 1978-1979. Unlike the 68000, the Z8000 had a simple 16-bit architecture.
Another competitor: Motorola’s 16-bit 68000 MP had a 32-bit internal architecture, but it didn’t come out in time to become one of the options for the IBM PC.
In October 1978, six months after the announcement of the Intel 8086, I moved to the MOS division at TI and became the MP manager. By that time, everyone in the company, and many outside of it, knew that TI’s 16-bit MP strategy didn’t work. Unit’s failed attempt to develop compatible 16-bit TMS9 microcontrollerThe 940, which had already gone through 5 or 6 iterations by the time I arrived, only exacerbated this problem.
I knew I was inheriting a difficult situation. So why did I quit a good job as a manager of consumer product development? Location, location, location. The microprocessor business was in Houston, and TI moved consumer products to Lubbock, Texas. Lubbock is a city where the correct answer to the question «How do you like it here?» The people here are wonderful. Country singer Mack Davis, who grew up here, once wrote a song with the refrain «I thought happiness was Lubbock, Texas in the rearview mirror.»
Shortly after I arrived in Houston, I was told that I would have to give a presentation on the TMS9900 to a group at IBM who were working on a very secret project that required a 16-bit microprocessor. The group traveled from an unusual location for IBM: Boca Raton, Florida. I prepared for this for a very long time, delivered what I thought was a well-prepared presentation, and worked diligently with the aftermath. But the IBM team didn’t show much enthusiasm. Until 1981, we did not know what we lost.
John Opel, president and later CEO of IBM, made a revolutionary move by founding the Boca Raton division, which later became known as the Entry Systems Division. He realized that personal computers from Apple, Commodore, Radio Shack, TI and others could threaten IBM’s dominance in the computer business. So he gave Philip Estridge’s Boca Raton group carte blanche to develop their product, the IBM personal computer. They could use the help of third parties for anything, including the development of the OS and application programs. This attitude made the system fairly «open» by IBM standards, and accelerated the product’s time to market. However, Opel had one limitation: the product would bear the IBM name, so it could not undermine the company’s reputation for quality and reliability. So the massive quality control organization within IBM had to sign off on this product before it went on sale.
Instant success: The IBM 5150 PC came out in August 1981. In the US, the $1565 price did not include a monitor, printer, and two disk drives.
The IBM team’s choice of a 16-bit MP was out of the question. The Motorola 68K, as it was later called, was without a doubt the clear favorite. It had the largest logical address space, which was even more important than the minimum 16-bit internal architecture. It was easy to expand to a fully 32-bit architecture. And, most importantly, 68K worked with «Big Endian» byte order, that is, from high to low. It refers to the order in which computers store bytes in memory. 16-bit architecture evolved from 8-bit, and engineers had to decide which of the 8-bit bytes would be the first in the 16-bit world. Digital Equipment Corp. has chosen a «Little Endian» order for its Programmed Data Processor (PDP) and VAX architectures. Intel did the same. But IBM computers used a different order, «Big Endian». In order for «Big Endian» to communicate with «Little Endian», the byte order had to be reversed on the fly. At that time, such data conversion was not trivial. 68K from Motorola did not require conversion for use with the IBM PC.
So why don’t we use 68K based computers today?
The answer has to do with who entered the market first. The 8088 wasn’t perfect, but at least it was ready, and the 68K wasn’t. IBM’s rigorous quality assessment process required the manufacturer to provide thousands of released product samples for each new part so that IBM could conduct live tests on them. IBM had hundreds of engineers doing quality control, but it takes time. In the first half of 1978, Intel had already produced examples of the 8088. By the end of 1978, the 68K was not yet fully ready for release.
Unfortunately for Motorola, the Boca Raton group wanted to bring the new IBM PC to market as soon as possible. So they only had two completely finished 16-bit MPs to choose from. In a competition between two imperfect chips, Intel’s chip was less imperfect than TI’s.
The TMS9900 was not left to die quietly without receiving recognition from the IBM PC. Managers still hoped to push through the corporate strategy.
Of course, TI’s home computer, which is yet to be announced, will have to use TMS9900?
The computer development team reluctantly agreed to give it a try. This group was the result of an unfortunate merger between two departments, one developing the game console and the other the personal computer. The resulting hybrid was not adapted for either one or the other. But TI stubbornly stuck to their line. The TI-99/4 entered the market in 1979, followed by the TI-99/4A in 1981. The company eventually sold 2.8 million units, most of them at a loss, until it exited the PC market at 1984.
Meanwhile, the Intel 8086 architecture has evolved and overcome its shortcomings. It still uses Little Endian byte order, but that doesn’t matter today. And Motorola, with its superior technology, lost the single most important design competition in the last 50 years.
Since we’re talking about other competitors, I’ll say a few words about the OS for the IBM PC. The logical choice for a 16-bit OS was an extension of the popular CP/M OS developed by Gary Kildall at Digital Research based on the Zilog Z80.
The Boca Raton group knew there was an open standard behind CP/M, so they commissioned Digital Research to develop a version called CP/M-86. In the process, Microsoft emerged with the MS-DOS proposal, about which much has already been written. Therefore, the PC world has not evolved in the direction that one might first think, both in terms of the OS and in terms of the microprocessor.
What lessons can we learn from history? One, if you are developing a product based on a rapidly changing new technology, then the key is to be the first to market, no matter what the limitations of your initial product. Today in Silicon Valley, this approach is called the creation of a «minimum viable product.» If your product has new features that differentiate it from others, your customers will come up with innovative ways to use it.
Second lesson — if you run a large corporation that wants to create a project in a small, isolated department, not burdened by baggage or tradition, think about the restrictions placed on it.