By: Scott Piercy, Nigel Woodford, and Nathan Odle

In 1971 a new company founded only 3 years beforehand by two maverick engineers who departed Fairchild Semiconductor introduced the worlds first "microprocessor", the Intel 4004. Originally developed as a "brainchild" solution for a Japanese calculator manufacturer that went bankrupt before ever using the CPU, it became the foundation for the revolution that followed.

It all started in 1968 when Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore, two disillusioned engineers with Fairchild Semiconductor, decided to go off on their own and start their own company. This company was of course named Intel, short for INTegrated ELectronics. It's ironic that Fairchild Semiconductor itself was born from a similar departure by some key engineers at Hewlett Packard 11 years prior. Though it almost sounds too "storybook" to be true, apparently a one page typed up business plan was enough for venture capitalist Art Rock to quickly raise the 2.5 million dollars needed to start their company.

Intel's first microprocessor was the brainchild of Intel engineer Ted Hoff. Intel was approached in 1969 by Japanese calculator manufacturer Busicom to design 12 custom chips to power their new business calculator. Being a relatively small startup company they didn't realistically possess the manpower to design 12 chips nor get them manufactured. Hoff's idea was to replicate the functions of these 12 custom chips with a "programmable general purpose logic chip." Between himself and Stan Mazor tackling the programming side, and a team headed by another Intel engineer Federico Faggin, the project was successfully completed.

This new chip was released in 1971 and was known as the Intel 4004. The 4004 was a 2300 transistor 4bit CPU that operated at a maximum clock of 740 Khz. For those used to more modern units, this is 0.740 MHz, or 0.000740 GHz. The CPU occupied less than 1/8th square inches of area yet possessed the rough equivalent processing power of the legendary ENIAC of the 1940's, which was of course slightly larger at about 1800 square feet.

Busicom ended up going into bankruptcy and never used Intel's 4004. However, the 4004 was eventually utilized in many other applications. Due to it's programmability it was able to replace many custom logic circuits. The Pioneer 10 spacecraft launched in 1972 went down in history as the first spacecraft to possess a microprocessor, said microprocessor being none other than an Intel 4004. If Intel had their "Intel Inside" promotion back then, that certainly would have looked cool on the side of an interstellar spacecraft.