Little unknown story: the 8088 was designed in Israel, but was inspired by Italian physicist Federico Faggin. [0], who invented its predecessor, the 4004.
You can see in his foundation page [1] that the 4004 had its initials (FF) circuit-stamped in the board.
As the designer of the 8080 and Z80, that kind of makes Faggin the father of the brain of the Game Boy.
And I wasn’t aware so many Intel processors were developed in Israel.
I feel like if we walked down the entire supply chain and design lineage of a device like the Game Boy, we’d see a wonderful collaboration of people from many regions across time. All contributing to keep me quiet on long car rides.
That history is a bit muddled so let me clarify. I'm a big fan of Federico Faggin, but Stan Mazor, Ted Hoff, and Masatoshi Shima are also co-inventors of the 4004. Next, the 4004 had approximately nothing to do with later processors including the 8088. The 8008 was built to copy the design of the TTL-based Datapoint 2200 computer. (TI produced its copy, the TMX 1795, before Intel produced the 8008.) Datapoint rejected the 8008 so Intel sold it as a product. The 8008 was followed by the 8080 and 8085 and then extended to the 16-bit 8086. The 8086 was intended as a temporary stopgap until Intel completed the iPAX 432, their flagship processor. (The "micromainframe" 432 was a failure.) Intel Israel created a lower-cost version of the 8086 with an 8-bit bus. This was the 8088, which was used in the IBM PC, creating the success of the x86 architecture.
After using a sibling’s Ti-99/4a, my first real “puter” was a hand-me-down PC/XT with an 8088, CGA, 256k RAM and dual 5-1/4” floppy drives. Much appreciation for the nostalgic post.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 36.4 ms ] threadYou can see in his foundation page [1] that the 4004 had its initials (FF) circuit-stamped in the board.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin
[1]: http://www.fagginfoundation.org/it/biografia/
And I wasn’t aware so many Intel processors were developed in Israel.
I feel like if we walked down the entire supply chain and design lineage of a device like the Game Boy, we’d see a wonderful collaboration of people from many regions across time. All contributing to keep me quiet on long car rides.
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10265802...