The Hamsterdome

Gears and wheels

Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine

There was no electricity in this one. Babbage designed a "mill" to do arithmetic and a "store" for memory, all made of turning number wheels and driven by punched cards. It was never built, but it was a general-purpose computer on paper a century before the electronic ones.

In my museum: Analytical Engine

Relays and vacuum tubes

switches you can hear click, and glass tubes that glow

The first computers switched electricity with electromechanical relays, then with vacuum tubes, which were much faster but ran hot and burned out. ENIAC had about 18,000 of them.

In my museum: The Bombe, Zuse Z3, Colossus, Harvard Mark I, ENIAC, Manchester Baby, UNIVAC I, Whirlwind

The transistor

John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley

The first working transistor was built at Bell Labs in 1947, and its inventors shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. Small, cool and reliable, transistors replaced vacuum tubes, and every chip on this page is made of them.

In my museum: DEC PDP-1, IBM System/360, DEC PDP-7, DEC PDP-10, Magnavox Odyssey

[see the first transistor]

The integrated circuit

Jack Kilby, then Robert Noyce

Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments demonstrated the first working integrated circuit on September 12, 1958, and about six months later Robert Noyce at Fairchild made the first practical one on a single piece of silicon. Kilby won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for it.

Noyce had co-founded Fairchild with Gordon Moore, who noticed in 1965 that the number of components on a chip kept doubling about every year, later revised to every two: Moore's law, the prediction the rest of this page keeps proving. In 1968 the two of them left to found Intel.

[see Kilby's first circuit]

In my museum: Apollo Guidance Computer, Imlac PDS-1, DEC PDP-11, Kenbak-1, Cray-1, Xerox Alto, Pong, Unix V6

Intel 4004

the first microprocessor · 4-bit · 2,300 transistors · 740 kHz · $60

A whole processor on one chip, released on November 15, 1971. It was designed for Busicom's printing calculators by Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, Stan Mazor and Masatoshi Shima.

Calculators drove the whole first wave of these chips. HP shipped the HP-35 a year later, but built it from a five-chip set of its own design rather than a general-purpose processor, which was still the normal way to do it.

In my museum: HP-35

Intel 8008

8-bit · 3,500 transistors

Intel's first 8-bit processor. Its design came from Computer Terminal Corporation for the Datapoint 2200 terminal, and Intel was allowed to sell it to everyone else too.

Intel 8080

8-bit · 2 MHz · about 4,500 to 6,000 transistors, depending on the source

Faster and easier to use than the 8008, it powered the Altair 8800 and was the original target for the CP/M operating system. Bill Gates and Paul Allen's first BASIC ran on it.

In my museum: Altair 8800

Motorola 6800

8-bit · 4,100 transistors · one 5-volt power supply

Motorola's first microprocessor, and easy to design with because it needed only one power supply. It's also the ancestor of the 6502: the engineers who designed it left to build a cheaper version.

General Instrument CP1600

16-bit · 3 to 5 MHz · about 0.9 MHz as the CP1610 in the Intellivision

The odd one out on this page: while everyone else was building 8-bit chips out of the calculator trade, General Instrument and Honeywell shrank a minicomputer. Announced in February 1975, its registers and instruction set look a lot like DEC's PDP-11, which makes the Intellivision the only console here running something close to a minicomputer's instruction set.

General Instrument sold it only to companies it chose and never licensed a second source, so it stayed rare. The CP1610 version of it is the one most people have used without knowing.

In my museum: Intellivision

MOS Technology 6502

8-bit · about 3,500 transistors · $25

Chuck Peddle's team at MOS Technology launched it in September 1975 for $25, less than a sixth the price of the 6800 or 8080. That price is why it ended up in so many home computers and game consoles.

In my museum: Apple I, Apple II, Commodore PET, Commodore VIC-20, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, Atari 2600, NES

Zilog Z80

8-bit · 8,500 transistors · 2.5 MHz to start

Federico Faggin left Intel in 1974 and co-founded Zilog, and the Z80 could run the 8080's software while adding more registers and instructions. Masatoshi Shima, who worked on the 4004 and 8080, helped design it too.

In my museum: TRS-80 Model I, Osborne 1, ZX Spectrum, ColecoVision, Sega Master System, Game Boy, Sega Genesis

Intel 8086 and 8088

16-bit · 29,000 transistors · 5 MHz

The 8086 (1978) started the x86 line that most PCs still use today. The cheaper 8088 (1979) had an 8-bit outside bus, and IBM picked it for the original IBM PC.

In my museum: IBM PC 5150

Motorola 68000

16/32-bit · about 68,000 transistors

32-bit registers on a 16-bit chip, and much easier to program than its rivals. It became the brain of the first wave of mouse-and-windows computers, and the Sega Genesis.

In my museum: Apple Lisa, Macintosh 128K, Amiga 500, Sega Genesis, NeXT Computer, Palm Pilot, Mac OS 8.1

Intel 286

16-bit · 134,000 transistors · 6 MHz · 16 MB of memory

Released February 1, 1982. It kept the 8086's instruction set but widened the address bus to 24 bits, so it could reach 16 MB instead of 1 MB, and added a "protected mode" that walled programs off from each other's memory. It ran the IBM PC/AT in 1984 and the enormous clone industry that grew up around it.

Its flaw was famous: once in protected mode the chip could not get back out without a reset, which made it awkward to run old DOS programs. Bill Gates called it brain-damaged. The 386 fixed it three years later.

Intel 386

32-bit · 275,000 transistors

The first 32-bit x86 processor. The first PC to use it was the Compaq Deskpro 386, the first time a company other than IBM moved the PC standard forward.

It also had a long second life as an embedded chip: the 386EX was still running the first BlackBerry fourteen years later.

In my museum: Windows 95, BlackBerry 850

Acorn ARM1

32-bit RISC · 6 MHz

Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber designed it at Acorn, the company behind the BBC Micro, and the first chips worked the day they arrived: April 26, 1985. Its first job was as a second processor for the BBC Micro. Today more than 230 billion ARM chips have been made, including the one in your phone.

Its descendants are in nearly every pocket machine here: an ARM 610 ran the Newton, an ARM7 core ran the Nokia 3310, and the first iPod had two of them.

In my museum: BBC Micro, Apple Newton MessagePad, Nokia 3310, iPod

WDC 65C816

8/16-bit · about 22,000 transistors

Bill Mensch's Western Design Center made a 16-bit version of the 6502 that could still run 6502 code. It went into the Apple IIGS and, in a modified form, the Super Nintendo.

In my museum: Super Nintendo

MIPS R3000

32-bit RISC · 115,000 transistors · up to 33 MHz

A simple, fast RISC design used in Silicon Graphics workstations, and in the Sony PlayStation. The Nintendo 64's processor is a later MIPS chip.

In my museum: PlayStation, Nintendo 64, PlayStation 2

Intel 486

32-bit · 1.2 million transistors · 25 MHz at launch

The first x86 chip to put the math coprocessor and a small cache on the same piece of silicon, and the first to be pipelined, so it did roughly twice the work per clock as a 386. It was the everyday PC processor of the early 90s, in desktops and in the first laptops worth carrying.

In my museum: Gateway 2000, IBM ThinkPad 701C

PowerPC 601

32-bit RISC · 2.8 million transistors

The first chip from the AIM alliance of Apple, IBM and Motorola. Apple used it in the first Power Macintosh computers on March 14, 1994, moving the Mac off the 68000 family.

In my museum: Mac OS 8.1

Intel Pentium

32-bit · 3.1 million transistors · 60 or 66 MHz

Intel's fifth-generation x86, released March 22, 1993. In 1994 a math professor found its famous FDIV bug, which got some divisions slightly wrong, and Intel had to offer replacements. That same year, composer Walter Werzowa wrote the five-note "Intel bong" to the rhythm of "In-tel In-side," so from then on these chips had their own theme song.

In my museum: Windows 95

[the bong, in Intel's own history] [watch 1990s Intel Inside ads]

PowerPC 750 (G3)

32-bit · 6.35 million transistors

Apple introduced the G3 on November 10, 1997. Its low power use and small size made it a good fit for the colorful iMacs and iBooks.

In my museum: iMac G3

Hitachi SH-4

32-bit RISC · 200 MHz in the Dreamcast

Hitachi's SuperH family started in the early 1990s, using short 16-bit instructions to save memory. Hitachi and STMicroelectronics designed the SH-4 for the Dreamcast, with extra math hardware for 3D graphics.

In my museum: Dreamcast

AMD Athlon

22 million transistors · the first 1 GHz desktop chip

AMD's Athlon debuted June 23, 1999, and became the first desktop processor to reach one gigahertz.

In my museum: Compaq Presario 5000

Intel Pentium 4

42 million transistors

Intel built the Pentium 4 to chase raw clock speed, promising 10 GHz someday. It stopped near 4: the chips simply ran too hot, and the whole industry turned to putting multiple cores on a chip instead. Even so, transistor counts went from 2,300 in the 4004 to 42 million here in under 30 years, doubling about every two years, as Moore predicted.

In my museum: Compaq Presario 5000

The chip in your pocket

32-bit ARM11 · about 412 MHz in the iPhone · a whole system on one chip

The iPhone (2007) and the first Android phone (2008) both ran ARM11 processors, descendants of Acorn's ARM1 from 1985. By now the processor was one block on a system on a chip, sharing its sliver of silicon with the graphics, the memory controller and more.

In my museum: iPhone, T-Mobile G1