I heard the Aztecs went to the moon eons before that other Armstrong guy :)




On Tue, Nov 21, 2023 at 6:34 PM Paul Koning via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

>
>
> > 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
>
>
>

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