Re: question on LED clock operation

I believe this is what happened - CTC ordered the 8008 to be designed but
Intel was slow in delivery to the point where they missed their contract
deadline and CTC cancelled their order and in order to have a marketable
device built a terminal which would follow the same instruction set out of
discrete components (a board full of chips in place of the single
microprocessor chip).

Later, Intel realized that they had already spent something like 80% of the
cost of developing the 8008 and while they figured they would never get
their money back, they would recover more of their costs by completing the
project rather than junking it (which is what the 2nd source for the 8008 -
(TI?- I forget who) did. Once Intel completed the 8008, CTC used them in the
later Datapoints and other people found other uses for them as well. In
response to user feedback, Intel designed the next version which was the
8080, which was backwards compatible (used the same instruction set). This
humble terminal chip is the grandfather of today's mighty Pentiums.



"Joe Sterling" <hanrahanman@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1166864344.760991.67100@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
..

2. The reference you cite concerning the Datapoint 220 is very
confused: "While the initial Datapoint 2200 did not have a
microprocessor in it, it had the programmable equivalent of an Intel
8008 and it funded the initial development of the first microprocessor.
Thus it is the first microprocessor based computer. ".




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