Microchips That Shook the World 185
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.'"
All of them great (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Print Link, The 25 in a list (Score:3, Insightful)
Five pages really isn't bad though, there's a lot of reading per page, whereas a typical site might have one page or more for the explanation as to why each chip was considered significant.
Also, just listing the "winners" doesn't do justice to the article.
The 8088? Oh, please! (Score:5, Insightful)
FTFA:
Among the many great chips that have emerged from fabs during the half-century reign of the integrated circuit...Intel's 8088
Wrong. 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 form production and the 8088 was in production 'now'. IBM felt that it had do it 'now' or miss the market window, so they (reluctantly) went with the 8088. A combination of perfect timing, luck, great marketing form IBM and Intel then and superb marketing strategy from Intel (the best selling sow's ear ever) sealed its place in history as a marketing success, but by no means a technical marvel.
Re:The 6502 - coulda, woulda, shoulda... (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a pretty good write up of those days at MOS in the Rise and Fall of Commodore book that was reviewed here on Slashdot some time ago.
I'm glad the 6502 made the list, along with the 68000 that the Amiga used so well along with Paula, Agnes, Denise etc and its successors the 68020, 040 etc. 8088 of course, and the 555 still in use today as others have mentioned. SPARC was pretty big in its day. Z80. ARM1. Those are the ones that stick out in my head the most.
And yea the Crusoe, I dunno about that.
It's amazing how most of these names are not much more than a word or phrase in the eyes of most people born in the 1990s or late 1980s. To us older chickens they were almost breathing, anthropomorphic beings because of how tightly you could weave assembly code around them and take advantage of their physical properties, bugs and nuances to perform hacks. When computers stopped being quaint hobby machines, they lost their soul. Early steam engines were similar, with highly polished brass, brightwork and victorian scroll work, imbued with the personality of their creators. When the railroads got real big, they became commodities, were painted black and weren't assigned a crew for life, so there was no pride of ownership. Now we are in the the era of the Dell box...I don't build my own machines anymore because it doesn't make any financial sense.
Good times to remember.
Motorola 68k (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:All of them great (Score:3, Insightful)
The operational basics of the 555 are completely explained by a half-page functional block diagram. You can easily fit all the important max ratings and speeds and such on the other half of the page. Even the 10F200 has a 96 page data sheet (though to be fair, to be that thorough about the 555 would probably require 2 or 3 pages, not just one).
The PIC has a lot going for it when compared to a 555, but simplicity is not one of those things.
6502 and 680x0 both! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, I learned my first Assembly Language on the 6502 back in 1983 or so, and had just started writing cool, fast game and utility software on the Atari 800 around 1985 using the very nice Atari Macro Assembler, when *boom* the era of Atari was over.
So I moved to the Amiga and programmed that lovely machine in 680x0 assembler using the slick "DevPac" programming environment by HiSoft. Bad geek that I was, I never learned Intuition or any of the Amiga system calls, but went straight to the hardware for the titles I worked on, namely "Dino Wars" and "Bill 'n' Ted's Excellent Adventure" (apologies for both). Then *boom* the Amiga was dead.
After a long hiatus from programming I got a PowerMac. On the Mac the first software I bought was the fringe macro assembler "Fantasm" by Lightsoft, thinking I'd be a Mac Assembler guru, but alas, Apple had moved from 680x0 to the PowerPC by that time, and only insane maniacs program that chip directly in Assembler.
So finally, in 1995 I finally learned C, and a few years later C++.
Of course nowadays I learn a new programming language every year and an entirely new framework or API every couple of months.
Re:Crusoe was a failure (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, the Crusoe did enable x86 to push into the handheld computing market. Although, MIDs and UMPCs haven't exactly taken off, but the Crusoe got the market open for long enough for Intel to bring their entries into the market (the Intel A100 and A110 (underclocked Dothan Pentium Ms,) and later the Atom.)
Re:All of them great (Score:2, Insightful)
Once could say we don't have enough segments... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, one could make the argument that we do not have enough segments. Were there more segments available within an application, you could have theoretically eliminated some sorts of attacks caused by buffer overruns.
Looking back at the time, going from segments to flat was a godsend. However, going from segments to selectors would have been probably better from a security standpoint, although computers would be slower.
Re:All of them great (Score:2, Insightful)
PowerPC (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:All of them great (Score:3, Insightful)
but does it run linux?
Re:Only 1 chip from the 21st century makes the lis (Score:3, Insightful)
Nah, you no longer need to be extremely inovative to produce awesome chips. These are the days of cheap transistors on nm manufacturing scales. We have gotten to the point where a clever way of doing something is obsolete, because its faster and cheaper to throw more transistors at our designs and resuse all our existing "cleverness".
There is something about limited resources that encourages amazing innovation. When we have "enough", why innovate?
Influential chips -- not innovative ones (Score:3, Insightful)
"But the 6502? A lucky near-clone of the 6800 that was popular not because it was particularly innovative, but because it was cheap. The 8088? The bastard stepchild of the 8086 which lucked out in getting picked over the 68000 in the IBM PC."
The article is entitled, "25 Microchips That Shook the World". The criteria is chips which were influential in their impact. That doesn't necessarily mean they had clean or clever designs, or were particularly innovative, or even "good" by any objective measure. It means that they mattered in the course of industry.
You dismiss the 6502 because it's only innovation was low cost. That still counts, and arguably more than most other distinctions. The Ford Model T, the Apple II, the IBM-PC clones, even books printed on the Gutenberg printing press -- their big difference was that they were cheap enough to bring their products to a much wider market. Legions of people who couldn't afford technology before suddenly could .
The 8088's big feature was being in the right place at the right time, no doubt about it. But it still went on to propel the x86 in to being the dominant architecture for general-purpose computers today. Wintel uses it. Apple Mac uses it. Most free *nix boxes use it. Sun uses it in many of their products. Even supercomputers use it. Quite simply, x86 is everywhere. That's "world shaking" by any definition I can think of.
There's a lesson here, too. Many times engineers and geeks favor technically sophisticated or clean designs, and reject designs which don't meet those criteria, and loose big time when their theoretically "better" design loose out to a cheaper or more practical alternative. Call it "worst is better" if you like, but putting all your money on a horse that loses the race isn't good, either.