Microchips That Shook the World

wjousts writes "IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article on '25 Microchips That Shook the World,' including such classics as the Signetics NE555 Timer, MOS Technology 6502 Microprocessor (Apple II, Commodore PET and the brain of Bender) and the Intel 8088 Microprocessor. Quoting: 'Among the many great chips that have emerged from fabs during the half-century reign of the integrated circuit, a small group stands out. Their designs proved so cutting-edge, so out of the box, so ahead of their time, that we are left groping for more technology clichés to describe them. Suffice it to say that they gave us the technology that made our brief, otherwise tedious existence in this universe worth living.'"

Bender? is that you?

[DudeFromMars]

If the 6502 was good enough for Bender, why did they bother with anything else?

Re:386?

[noidentity]

Protected mode was just the x86 architecture welcoming itself back to the reality most other processors already inhabited.

Re:All of them great

[frieko]

As a young whippersnapper I imagine the pain of reading the 555 datasheet whenever I flash a timer to an 8-pin microcontroller ;)

Re:All of them great

[frieko]

And in return I'm going to port MPLAB to the 555 ;)

Re:The 8088? Oh, please!

[x2A]

"The 8088 was a technical nightmare with a crappy architecture . It just got lucky. IBM's justifiable preference was Motorola's infinitely superior 68000. Unfortunately, the 68000 was 9 months to a year away"

Yeah, I hear ya, the architecture of a chip is much more important than whether it exists or not.