Processor pioneer Victor Poor dies of cancer at 79 Victor Poor, whose death was announced this weekend, isn’t one of the first names to come to mind among computing history, but he played a pivotal role in the development of Intel's early architectures that went on to dominate modern computing and is a legend in ham radio circles. Poor, along with fellow radio enthusiast and …
Not as rubbish as the service from PC World though. I remember an ex having a Packard Bell and when the hard drive died (chip blew on it with a pop) they said they would re-image the machine to repair it lol.
Obviously when they realised it was a component failure they weren't well prepared. They got a drive in and to set the Master/Slave mode (IDE days) they bent the pins so they touched. Have they not heard of jumpers?
How come the bio in the NY Times is so different?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/technology/victor-poor-intel-computer-chip-innovator-dies-at-79.html
I'll take a wild leap of faith and say TheReg's story is a lot closer to the truth, but still amazing how they seem to be 2 very different stories.
Ah, the 555 - a godsend to kids interested in learning about integrated circuits, back in the day. Radio Shack sold them along with a book of 555-based projects you could build with just some basic tools (breadboarded, wire-wrapped, or soldered).
The first IC-based project I built was a 555-based tone generator. Did it with a friend who had never done any electronics before (I had some experience with discrete components, through those "science project" kits they sold for kids).
Thanks for the note about Camenzind. I hadn't seen that elsewhere.
The Reg article could be read that way but the NY Times suggests his company put up the money.
*If* so that would make *both* of the key major forces in the computer world are simply the result of *buying* their innovation in and recognizing they were on to a good thing when they saw it.
Which would explain quite a lot about Intel & MS's relationship over the years.
He sounds like a true innovator and I wonder where will the *next* generation of such people come from.
The CHM interview with Poor doesn't mention anything about the 4004. Other sources say the 4004 was designed in-house at Intel to a specification from Japanese calculator manufacturer Busicom, and wasn't architecturally related to the
8008.
Also the Datapoint 2200's 1201 CPU was implemented in SSI/MSI: by the time Intel delivered the 8008 chip, they weren't interested any more.
Actually, the 4004 is mentioned but not by name.
On p34, Poor says: "And Ted Hoff [Intel] had this 4-bit calculator chip he was building, designing for a Japanese firm."
As for what became the 8008, On p35 Poor goes on to say:
"It was an external design. I mean, we were in no position to dictate how it would be implemented internally."
[...] "they [Intel] took that-- they came-- and then there was some give and take. They came back
with some changes and some ideas. I can't tell you who was finally responsible for the design. I mean,
there were so many people in the act."
Intel eventually implemented an 8-bit design but by then, as you say, a Computer Terminal Corporation's 1-bit MSI implementation was already in production in the 2200.
I do like what Poor says about Intel's 'spec' for this (p33):
"And we kind of merged what Harry and I had done with what they wanted. They wanted-- they had an idea. They want-- they had done some "market research". <laughs> They said they wanted a machine that had the same footprint exactly as a Selectric typewriter, the same keyboard layout as a Selectric typewriter, the same feel. They wanted a screen that had the same dimensions for character size and spacing as the type on a Selectric typewriter. "
Xerox had Ethernet running in the lab around 1973, but it wasn't a commercial product until around 1982. By 1977, Datapoint was selling Attached Resource Computing (ARC), which we'd now recognize as a LAN. It was not promoted as a standard the way Ethernet was, but ARCnet probably outlived Datapoint and showed up here and there during the 1980s. So I credit them for the first production LAN.
Yes, ARCnet was very popular right up until 10Base-T Ethernet was introduced (late '80s). 10Base-T was such a value and convenience that it basically killed its token-based competitors (ARCnet, Token Ring, Token Bus) except in shops that had a large investment or for specialized applications. (I understand ARCnet is still popular for some embedded uses, and for a long time Token Bus was big in the factory-automation market; don't know if that's still the case.)
Then economies of scale let Ethernet improve steadily in performance and price, and that eventually pushed it even into places that had invested in other networking technologies, as equipment got replaced.
Standard UNIX/Linux headers still have ARCnet definitions, eg APRHRD_ARCNET for ARP on ARCnet.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
