Intel's First ICs

Intel was founded in 1968 to make memory, not processors. Its first product, the 3101 of 1969, was a 64-bit static RAM built in fast Schottky bipolar logic. A year later the 1103 put 1,024 bits of dynamic RAM on one chip, at a price that let semiconductor memory begin to replace the magnetic core from which main memories had been built.

The 1702 of 1971 added a third kind of memory: one that kept its contents without power, yet could be erased under ultraviolet light and written again. That made program code cheap to change, just as code became the point. The same year, a calculator commission from the Japanese firm Busicom became the 4004, a four-bit central processor on a single chip, sold with its own family of support chips.

The 8008 of 1972, commissioned by the terminal maker Computer Terminal Corporation, widened the processor to eight bits, and the 4040 of 1974 refined the four-bit line with interrupts and a larger instruction set. In six years Intel had gone from a memory supplier to a maker of microprocessors, and each chip here marks one step of that turn.