> On Nov 21, 2023, at 7:13 PM, Antonio Carlini via cctalk
> <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> On 21/11/2023 23:14, Will Cooke via cctalk wrote:
>> More information is here:
>> https://firstmicroprocessor.com/?doing_wp_cron=1700608229.8666059970855712890625
>>
>> I think that is the designers (Rod Holt?) website. Apparently he won a
>> legal battle to use the term "first microprocessor" for whatever that is
>> worth.
>
> Details were published in 1998 and the chip was available approximately never
> (I presume, unless you were building a Tomcat) so I'm not sure you should
> count it. Perhaps "first microprocessor, until someone else claims another
> secret design that was even earlier" would be a more accurate claim?
Remember the guy at the British spook agency (GCHQ?) who said he invented RSA a
long time before Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman did? Perhaps so, but the fact
that it was all secret means it didn't matter to the real world.
This sort of thing happens a lot, in inventions or discoveries. There were
types of telegraphs before S.F.B. Morse came along, but his design took over
the world. There were Europeans who traveled to America before Columbus, but
nothing came of those explorations and they were pretty much forgotten. And FM
radio was first invented in 1919 by a Dutch engineer (Hanso Idzerda), not
around 1930 by Edwin Armstrong -- but Idzerda's design was a technological dead
end and disappeared from view by the late 1920s, while Armstrong's design
became universal and remains so.
So I tend to qualify "first to invent" (or "discover") as "first to invent and
make it matter".
paul
