A Visual Odyssey Of History’s Greatest Computers
by Dag Spicer
Decades ago at the dawn of the digital age, programming pioneer Danny Hillis attended his first computer conference, at a Hilton hotel in New York City. There, he observed an interaction that he delights in sharing to this day. After one of the presenters boldly forecasted that the market for microprocessors would someday be in the millions, a skeptical audience member called out: “Where are they all going to go? It’s not like you need a computer in every doorknob!”
“Years later, I went back to the same hotel,” Hillis remembers. “I noticed the room keys had been replaced by electronic cards you slide into slots in the doors. There was a computer in every doorknob.”
That incredible proliferation of computing power into every nook and cranny of our lives was driven by Moore’s Law. In 1965, Intel founder Gordon Moore famously extrapolated that the number of transistors on a chip roughly doubles every two years. Since then, Intel has proven Moore’s Law with a stream of innovations in microprocessor design and manufacturing, resulting in a steady increase in power at proportionate decreases in cost.
We asked Dag Spicer, the senior curator at the Computer History Museum, to select 12 breakthrough Intel microprocessors from our past and share the stories behind the transformative personal computer designs they powered.
1971
Busicom 141-PF calculator
for the Intel part number: 4004
Clock speed: 108 kHz
Transistors: 2,300
In one of the greatest deals in business history, Intel acquires the rights to a microprocessor it designed for Japanese calculator manufacturer Busicom for $65,000. The chip was the Intel 4004, the first commercially available microprocessor available as a component. Although nearly all of Intel’s profits at the time came from its memory chips, the 4004 was the first step into a new market — one that ultimately proved serendipitous when Japanese memory chip makers decimated the US memory chip industry.
1972
Micral-N
Intel part number: 8008
Clock speed: 800 kHz
Transistors: 3,500
Intel’s second microprocessor was also created under contract for an outside customer. Computer Terminal Corporation (CTC) had hired Intel to design a single-chip microprocessor for their Datapoint 2200 programmable terminal. While Intel designed the chip, both Texas Instruments and Intel were contracted to build it. The Texas Instruments model didn’t work at all and Intel’s version was late so that CTC reverted to a less-sophisticated approach. CTC then let Intel retain the rights to the design in lieu of the value of the initial contract. Initially called the 1201, Intel made a few minor changes to the design and released it as the 8008.
1974
MITS Altair 8800
Intel part number: 8080
Clock speed: 2 MHz
Transistors: 4,500
The 8080 is often thought of as the first microprocessor powerful enough to build a useful computer. While Intel’s earlier microprocessors found natural homes in products like cash registers, traffic light controls and calculators, the 8080 was the ‘go-to’ chip for the first generation of personal computers. The most notable 8080-based computer was the MITS Altair 8800, heralding the personal computing revolution when it appeared on the front cover of Popular Electronics in January of 1975. Albuquerque-based MITS was swamped with orders, and the buzz around the Altair motivated two Harvard students, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, to start a company — called Micro-Soft — to write software for it.
1979
IBM PC
Intel part number: 8088
Clock speed: 10 MHz
Transistors: 29,000
The 8088 was a cost-reduced version of the 8086. By cutting down the number of external data connections to eight (from 16), motherboards became simpler. It also allowed 8-bit support chips to be used, which resulted in cheaper computers. The most famous design made using the 8088 is the 1981 IBM PC, recreated in the tens of millions either by IBM or by legions of ‘clone’ makers around the world.
1982
IBM PC/AT
Intel part number: 80286
Clock speed: 6 MHz
Transistors: 134,000
The 80286 was the second chapter in the x86 story: It was 3–5 times faster than the 8088 used in the IBM PC — but able to run all the same software. It was widely used in computers from the mid-1980s to early 1990s. The 80286 was also Intel’s first attempt at supporting multitasking operating systems in which the failure of one application didn’t bring down the entire computer. The key design win for Intel was IBM’s new PC/AT.
1985
Compaq Deskpro
Intel part number: Intel386™ DX Processor
Clock speed: 16 MHz
Transistors: 275,000
The Intel386 DX processor marked Intel’s transition to a 32-bit architecture, a significant step that resulted in faster applications. The first Intel386 DX processors were used as servers only — no one thought a desktop user would ever need so much power. Enter Microsoft Windows, which would consume all of these beautiful “extra” cycles. It took almost another decade before 32-bit operating systems became mainstream.
1987
IBM PS/2 Model 25
Intel part number: 8086
Clock speed: 5 MHz
Transistors: 29,000
Intel’s 8086 microprocessor marks the beginning of the company’s mainstay “x86” product family, one of the most successful computer architectures in history and still the basis of more than 90 percent of all computers used today. Essentially a combination of features from its earlier 8080 and 8085 microprocessors, the 8086 supported 16-bit processing which greatly increased the speed and sophistication of possible software applications. Two years later, Intel announced the companion 8087 “math co-processor” chip which sped up technical applications like computer aided design and graphics. One of the world’s first portable computers, the 1978 Xerox NoteTaker, used the 8086 as did dozens of other desktop systems.
1989
Gateway 2000 PC
Intel part number: Intel486™ DX Processor
Clock speed: 25 MHz
Transistors: 1,200,000
Intel’s first microprocessor with over one million transistors, the Intel486 DX is the chip that made Microsoft Windows usable as a regular office tool for millions of people. Previous chips were underpowered for use in the Windows graphical interface environment but the Intel486 DX doubled the performance of its predecessor, making it popular with graphics professionals and gamers. Business Week called it a “Mainframe-on-a-chip.” The project was also a turning point for Intel: an internally-competing design, known as the i860, threatened to derail the Intel486 DX design but pressure from software developers (except, notably, from Microsoft) forced Intel to stick with its x86 architecture.
1993
HP Netserver LM
Intel model: Intel® Pentium® Processor
Clock speed: 66 MHz
Transistors: 3,100,000
Successor to the Intel486 DX, the Pentium Processor could process two instructions at once and had a massive 64-bit data bus. It became the primary microprocessor for personal computers in the mid-1990s. It could execute over 100 million instructions per second and was optimized for 3D graphics, games, and audio-video communications through the inclusion of special instructions — called Multi Media Extensions (MMX).
1995
ASCI Red
Intel model: Intel® Pentium® Pro Processor
Clock speed: 200 MHz
Transistors: 5,500,000
Intel’s Pentium Pro was a redesign of the “microarchitecture” of the x86 family. This new design, known as “P6,” brought supercomputer-like concepts into microprocessor design. Pentium Pro was much faster than the Pentium and came with a gigantic built-in “cache” memory. It also had the ability to share processing workload with other Pentium Pros. It was overkill for most desktops but was used frequently in servers. It was also used in the ASCI Red supercomputer, the first computer to process one trillion calculations per second.
2005
Dell Precision 380
Intel model: Intel® Pentium® Extreme Edition 840 processor Clock speed: 3.2 GHz Transistors: 230 million
As it became clear to chip makers in the mid-2000s that further clock speed improvements would be very difficult to achieve, focus began to shift to “multi-core” processors. These were microprocessors in which more than one processing core was built onto a single chip package. The Pentium Extreme Edition 840, codenamed Smithfield, was actually two processor cores built next to each other on a single die. It was the first x86 dual-core microprocessor intended for desktop computers like the Dell Precision 380 workstation.
2015
2015 Apple MacBook
Intel model: 5th generation Intel® Core™ processor family
Clock speed: 1.4 to 3.1 GHz Transistors: 1.3 to 1.9 billion
The most recent generation of Intel microprocessors are geared to today’s environment, featuring low-power, mobile computing with high-performance graphics support and built-in security features. This family of chips is built using 14nm lithography: The transistors it uses are five times smaller than a typical biological virus. Chips in this family also use “Hyper Threading,” which lets multiple applications run smoothly.
Dag Spicer is senior curator at the Computer History Museum, a nonprofit organization with a four-decade history as the world’s leading institution exploring the history of computing and its ongoing impact on society.
