Can you imagine a world without microprocessors? I can’t, and I was born into such a world. We could argue for days as to what comprised the first microprocessor. Having said this, it’s generally accepted that the first commercially available (and successful) microprocessor was the Intel 4004 (I have one of these little beauties in my personal collection).

The 4s in this device’s moniker were used to indicate that it employed a 4-bit data path. The 4004, which first saw the light of day in 1971, was part of a four-chip system which also consisted of a 256-byte ROM, a 32-bit RAM, and a 10-bit shift register.

The 4004 itself contained ~2,300 transistors and could execute 60,000 operations per second. The advantage of the 4004—as compared to earlier solutions based on multiple custom chips—was that, by simply changing the external program, the same device could be used to power a plethora of projects.

Until recently, the generally accepted creation story for the 4004—as was largely promoted by Intel—was that this was the brainchild of Marcian “Ted” Hoff, who was Manager of Applications Research, and Stan Mazor, who was an applications engineer at that time. The Italian-American physicist, engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur, Federico Faggin, is invariably mentioned as a co-creator, but I think it’s fair to say that his contributions have historically been somewhat minimalized and marginalized.

All that is beginning to change. I recently read Silicon: From the Invention of the Microprocessor to the New Science of Consciousness by Federico Faggin, who puts a substantially different spin on things. On the one hand, Federico makes a convincing argument that he played a MUCH larger role in the creation of the 4004 than most people were previously aware. On the other hand, his constant self-appreciation and self-promotion do tend to get up one’s nose a little. Be that as it may, this book provides a lot of historical context and it is well worth reading.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you about. The point of this blog (yes, of course there’s a point) is that my friend Joe Farr just sent me an email pointing me at an interesting article on Ars Technica. This article describes how hardware hacker Dmitry Grinberg managed to get Linux to boot in only 4.76 days on an Intel 4004 (there’s a man with too much time on his hands if ever I saw one LOL).

Intellectually, we all know that it’s possible to run any program on a Turing-complete machine, however simplistic, given enough time. But there’s a difference in knowing that something is theoretically possible and actually seeing that something in action.

My hat is off to Dmitry. I wonder what he will come up with next. How about you? Do you have any thoughts you’d care to share about any of this?