At the end of the 1960s, Intel's Ted Hoff (b. 1937) was asked to design several different calculators for a Japanese client. The traditional way would have been to develop several different integrated circuits—silicon chips—to do the work. Even though these were small enough to be put into handheld calculators, programmable computers, which could do a variety of jobs, were still huge devices.
Combining the small size of integrated circuits with the power of programmable computers was an inevitable idea. Hoff decided that he would make a single integrated circuit that could be programmed to do many different things. Joined by fellow engineers Stan Mazor (b. 1941) and Federico Faggin (b. 1941), Hoff squeezed an entire computer onto a single silicon chip, pairing it with a small memory to give it its instructions. His range of calculators all used the same chip, but each one had different instructions to instruct it how to behave.
Intel quickly realized that they had, quite literally in the palms of their hands, a programmable, general- purpose computer with the power of machines that a decade before had taken up entire rooms. Making a deal with the calculator manufacturer, Intel kept the rights to sell the chip to other people and released the Intel 4004 processor in 1971.
The 4004, the first commercial microprocessor, was also the first step in the revolution that would sweep the world during the 1970s and 1980s, taking computers from their air-conditioned industrial servitude and bringing them to homes, cars, and even washing machines.
