@kenshirriff Before I read your (fascinating) thread, I was a little surprised to hear that the 8008 wasn’t just an 8-bit development of the groundbreaking 4004 (as I’d assumed, despite having worked at Intel in the ’80s – clearly the marketing ploy worked on me!)

So I popped over to Wikipedia, where I found that the 8008 was indeed logically unrelated (and was originally going to be called the 1201), though unsurprisingly it used the same PMOS technology and 10-micron fabrication process as the 4004, which was only released a few months earlier

One thing I noticed is that your chronology differs slightly from that of the Wikipedia authors, and I’m curious to know which is right 🤔

The ‘History’ section of the Intel 8008 article [1] leans heavily on a 2008 article in Computerworld [2] (and incidentally also cites an interview with you for the naming of the chip!)

According to the Computerworld article, CTC’s first model was the Datapoint 3300, which used a TTL CPU board (and ran hot)

Its successor was supposed to use a CPU-on-a-chip, which CTC commissioned from Intel and Texas Instruments in early 1970

However, CTC clearly expected a very rapid turnaround (!) and decided to develop a TTL version of the Datapoint 2200, which sold its first units months later, in May 1970 [2]

Both Intel and TI demonstrated working 8-bit processors in 1971: TI got there first, in February [3], but its TMX 1795 was unreliable, and never made it into production; Intel delivered its 1201 to CTC towards the end of the year [2]

CTC by this time, though, was developing the TTL-based Datapoint 2200 II, which rendered Intel’s 1201 obsolete, so they ceded IP rights to Intel in lieu of paying them for the work [2]

Intel then marketed the ‘1201’ as the 8008 in April 1972

Whichever version of the story is correct, the Intel 8008 and the Datapoint 2200 clearly have a common heritage, and CTC’s commissioning of Intel to produce a processor that was never used by them ultimately led, by an accident of history, to the 8-bit Intel 8080 (and Zilog Z80) and the 16-bit Intel 8086, which formed the heart of the IBM PC

[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80

[2] computerworld.com/article/2532

[3] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropro

📷 CPU Collection Konstantin Lanzet, CC BY-SA 4.0