Inside Intel. Tim Jackson
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California for a progress check.
Masatoshi Shima, the Busicom engineer, was all smiles when Faggin and another designer met him at the airport. His tune changed when he saw the materials that Faggin had been ordered to show him. Shima, a talented engineer in his own right, realized immediately that it was no advance on what he had seen on his last visit. ‘You bad!’ he shouted. ‘You promised! You said design done! No design! This is just idea! This is nothing! I came here to check, but there is nothing to check!’
Faggin had been briefed not to let on that he had just arrived, but he realized that hiding the truth would merely make his position more untenable. He confessed to Shima what had happened and agreed to start work immediately. Carrying out the first piece of processor work of his career, he was now faced with a schedule that was almost impossible to meet.
Working with Stan Mazor, a fellow circuit designer, Faggin managed to turn the concepts into working prototypes of four chips at extraordinary speed. So rigorous was he as a circuit designer that the manufacturing prototypes of the first three devices of the four – the ROM, the RAM and the input-output chip – worked perfectly when they came off the line. The fourth, the processor itself, proved a little more problematic. The first prototype was absolutely dead, and it took Faggin some time to work out what had happened: the circuit was supposed to be built on the chip in a series of layers, and one of the layers had been accidentally missed out of the manufacturing process. The second prototype worked, and needed only minor adjustments. Three months after Faggin’s arrival from Fairchild and Shima’s arrival from Japan, defying the ‘one man, one chip, one year’ rule, Faggin and Mazor had produced four working chips.
By then, however, the calculator market in Japan had become a great deal more competitive. Shima’s bosses back in Tokyo decided that they could not build the Busicom machine profitably if they were to pay Intel the price for its chips that had originally been agreed. They came back to Intel, demanding a price cut.
Had Intel responded differently to this demand, it could never have become the company it is today. But Bob Noyce, fed with good advice from Hoff and Faggin, knew exactly what he wanted. He was willing to refund $60,000 to the client – but in return, he demanded a change in the licence terms. Instead of giving the client exclusive rights over the chip design, he said, Intel wanted the right to sell the design to other customers. The response from Tokyo was a qualified ‘yes’. As long as Intel would agree not to sell it to competing calculator companies, the general-purpose processor that had been designed for the Busicom machine was Intel’s to keep.
Faggin’s extraordinary achievement in delivering the chips so swiftly had not been without cost. With his wife and new baby back in Italy, Faggin had worked twelve, fourteen, sometimes even sixteen hours a day for weeks on end. Yet Andy Grove was in the middle of a campaign to turn Intel into a more serious, more professional outfit – and Les Vadasz, following Grove’s lead, relentlessly complained at Faggin when he arrived late for work. The complaints irritated Faggin mightily. Everyone in the lab, he said, knew that there were nights when he would still be at his workbench until dawn, going home only to snatch a few hours’ rest before returning to the plant. But Vadasz would not be moved. The result was that relations between Faggin and Vadasz began to deteriorate – and the talented young circuit designer began to find his work in the Intel research department increasingly miserable.
But there were compensations. Although he still missed his home town of Vicenza, Faggin was confident that he no longer wanted to return to Italy. He was becoming accustomed to the brilliant blue skies of northern California, and the beauty of the fruit orchards to the south that were still beyond the reach of the electronics industry. He was coming to terms with the strange food and drinks consumed by the Americans – Jell-O, cold milk, and weak coffee by the pint – and with their strange Midwestern objection to the civilized custom of drinking a glass of wine with one’s lunch. He was also beginning to appreciate the contrast between the orderliness of the engineers he was working with and the relaxed, timeless chaos still prevalent in Italy. And he devised a simple rule of thumb for life in America as a European. The ratio of everything was the same as the ratio of an inch to a centimetre. Cars, houses, refrigerators, shopping carts – everything in the States was two and a half times the size of its equivalent in Europe. On balance, Faggin decided, he might as well stay in California. The future looked interesting.
* * *
A NEW ERA IN INTEGRATED ELECTRONICS. This was the headline that Intel used to announce the launch of its 4004 microprocessor in an ad in Electronics News in November 1971. Gordon Moore went further. He described the microprocessor as ‘one of the most revolutionary products in the history of mankind’.
That wasn’t how it looked at the time.
People in the computer business viewed the 4004 as a fascinating novelty. They knew that it matched the power of the ENIAC, the world’s first vacuum-tube computer project, which was completed in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania under contract to the united States government. Built to calculate ballistics and detonation tables for American weaponry, ENIAC occupied an entire room, used 18,0 vacuum tubes, and consumed 200 kilowatts of power – enough to heat several family houses. The 4004, by contrast, was small enough to rattle around in a matchbox, and cost under $100.
But a 1946 computer wasn’t a practical comparison. In the quarter-century that had passed since then, the ENIAC had long been superseded by more modern machines using integrated circuits. By 1971 the 4004 offered an extraordinary combination of price and performance, but in absolute terms it wasn’t a serious contender for work inside ‘real’ computers. With the ability to process only 4 bits of information at a time, it was many times slower and many times punier than the 1971 state of the art in mainframe central processing units. One executive from the computer industry, entirely missing the point of the revolution that was about to take place, joked to Bob Noyce that he wouldn’t want to lose his whole computer through a crack in the floor. Even Stan Mazor, one of the members of the microprocessor design team, was famous for telling his friends that they should never trust a computer they could lift. Only if you could foresee that the 4004 would be followed by improved versions that would double its performance every eighteen months for the next quarter-century was it clear that microprocessors would eventually displace the great monoliths of the mainframe era, and bring computing power to every office desktop.
Intel’s marketing people looked at the new chip, and made pessimistic noises. Even if the part’s performance would increase as quickly as the performance of Intel’s memory devices had done – and that was a big if – there was a worry about how big the market for microprocessors would be. After all, only 20,000 mainframe computers had been sold in the entire world in 1971. Assume optimistically that Intel could gain a 10% market share, and you were left with sales of only 2,000 units a year. This was about a week’s production – and nowhere near enough to justify a serious R&D budget.
So if it wasn’t going to put the mainframe computer out of business, what was this new gadget for? Its creators inside Intel’s research lab were full of ideas. If the chip could go into a calculator like the Busicom machine, said the 4004’s creators, then it could also add intelligence to a whole range of electrical business machines – cash registers, coin-change machines, traffic lights, weighing machines, blood analysers, cocktail dispensers, microwave ovens, cars, whatever. Until now, building intelligence into such machines had been prohibitively expensive, because it required designing a special dedicated piece of computer hardware for each application. The 4004 would change all that. Since it was a miniature general-purpose computer, it could be used by industrial designers to do any number of jobs. The customization would be in the software – in the program that controlled the chip.
The target customers for this use of the 4004 were engineers in America’s biggest industrial companies. But most of these engineers knew nothing about computer programming. Instead, it was smaller, hungrier companies without a strong entrenched market position that saw the potential of the tiny chip first. This gave rise to a problem in Intel’s sales department. The customer list for the company’s memory products made up a Who’s Who of the computer industry: big, reliable, blue-chip firms that could be counted on not only to pay this month’s outstanding bill, but also to carry on sending in orders