[cctalk] Re: Intel 4004(sp?)

[Christian Corti via cctalk]

On Wed, 22 Nov 2023, Fred Cisin wrote:

An absurd argument:
It could be argued that the 8085, rather than being designed from scratch was 
simply a modification of the 8080.  Perhaps significant modifications, but 
nevertheless modifications, not redesign from scratch.


8080 and 8085 are essentially the same (from the programmer's view).

If we accept arguments such as that, then we could argue that Pentium is a 
modified 80486,

which is a modified 80386,
which is a modified 80286,
which is a modified 80186,
which is a modified 8086,
...
all the way down to the 4004  :-)


Right, this is what I always say.
BUT the cut is with the 8008. The 4004 is a completely different beast 
and has absolutely no ressemblence to the 8008, e.g. Harvard vs. 
Von-Neumann architecture etc.


The "modifications" (or better: heritage) can be seen if you look at the 
registers. Initially A, B, C, D, E, H and L, they were the same in the 
8080. When going 16 bits, they were "extended", i.e. called A extended, B 
extended and so on, with names AX, BX, CX, DX, and the addition of 
segmenmt registers. Later, when going to 32 bits, Intel already "forgot" 
what AX stood for, and so they called the registers "extended A extended" 
(EAX) and so on.


Therefore, it could be argued that Win11 can be run on a "heavily modified 
modified 4004"


8008, not 4004.

Motorola tended to redesign from scratch, whereas Intel would modify their 
previous design.


Yes, but that is a widely known fact.


[I warned you that it was absurd]


It isn't absurd at all, or not more absurd as my post ;-)

Christian

[cctalk] Re: Intel 4004

[ED SHARPE via cctalk]

Great history infoEd#

Sent from AOL on Android 
 
  On Thu, Nov 23, 2023 at 12:45 AM, Sellam Abraham via 
cctalk wrote:   As the one who helped Ray introduce the 
F14A CADC microprocessor to the
public back in 1998, I'm intimately familiar with the story of its creation
as well as its capabilities.

Ray officially announced the CADC at VCF 2.0 in 1998.  He was the keynote
speaker.  He brought along prototypes of the chips that he kept from his
time working at Garrett Air Research.  Ray first attempted to publish the
design in Computer Design magazine in 1971 but the military stepped in and
classified the project and prohibited him from disclosing anything.  As a
result the article was pulled.  In the mid-1990s he began an effort to have
the design de-classified so that he could finally talk about it, something
he'd been wanting to do since the early 1970s when they completed the
project successfully, under budget and with time to spare.  With the help
of his local assemblywoman, Zoe Lofgren (Santa Clara) he was able to get
the project de-classified (probably because the F14A is no longer produced,
and the CADC was only used in the F14A, so maybe Iran still has an interest
in CADC technology).

Ray actually approached me, contacting me by phone, I think.  He found me
by way of the Vintage Computer Festival and asked if I would be interested
in helping to bring disclosure to the CADC.  I wasn't sure what to make of
him at first as I already had some experience with hucksters promoting
themselves as having done the first this or that, but upon meeting Ray for
lunch he brought the goods (the prototype chips) and had the story and the
facts to back up what he said.  So we made an agreement to debut the CADC
officially at VCF 2.0.

Before we shopped the story around to the press, I decided that we should
first meet with Ted Hoff to show him the CADC design and let him know we
were going to make this public announcement that it beat out the 4004 by a
couple years (and by quite a bit in terms of capability).  The reasoning
being I didn't want him to feel slighted or to create animosity if we were
going to upend the history of microprocessors/microcomputing, which I felt
this story would do.  I was able to arrange a meeting with Hoff at his
office in Menlo Park or something (it's been many long and sometimes hard
years since 1998 so forgive me if I forget some minor details).  Ted was
cordial and then got right down to business, asking Ray a bunch of
questions about the design of the CADC.  And it came down to this: the CADC
was designed to be a multi-processing system.  While it was polling the
pilot's joystick (first fly-by-wire aircraft I believe), it was also
computing air speed/pressure, and using that to control the sweep (sorry
that I don't know the proper technical term) of the wings, while also
monitoring the weapons systems, etc.  It was processing something like 8
different tasks simultaneously, in a round-robin fashion.  Each sub-process
was contained on its own ROM chip.  The CADC central processor would
execute so many cycles of code on each ROM and then move onto the next.
The CADC had no program counter: since it was designed from its inception
to be a multi-processing (multi-threading?) system, it made sense to build
a program counter onto each ROM.  Therefore, when the CADC switched back to
that ROM to continue executing instructions, the program counter on that
ROM told the CADC where it was supposed to fetch the next instruction.
Once it became clear to Ted that the CADC did not have an integrated
program counter (though it easily could have) he pooh-poohed the entire
thing as not qualifying as a single-chip microprocessor and we spent the
rest of our time with him discussing other topics until it was time to wrap
up.  Ray and I both came out of the meeting somewhat bewildered at his
reaction and response, but in hindsight it was obvious that a gigantic part
of Ted Hoff's legacy is as "inventor of the 'first' microprocessor" and so
it made sense that he would be quick to protect that legacy rather than so
easily give it up to this nobody from out of nowhere with this fantastical
claim of a microprocessor before the 4004 that made the 4004 look like the
silly little calculator chip that it was.  I guess we were expecting him to
be more interested in the historical significance of Ray's disclosure and
welcome it but that was obviously naive.

Once that was out of the way, I began shopping the story around to the
press.  I first approached the San Jose Mercury News tech editor (Dan
whats-his-name), which would have been a natural fit all around, but he
just could not be bothered to return my messages.  I also pitched it to
Katie Hafner and/or (can't remember for sure) John Markoff at the New York
Times, and to Dan Kawasaki at the Wall Street Journal.  It was Dan Kawasaki
who actually got back to me and expressed a definite interest in the CADC
and Ray's story.  After an initial conversation wi

[cctalk] Re: Intel 4004(sp?)

[dwight via cctalk]

The 4040 was more of an enhanced 4004. It had a deeper stack ( 4004 was only 3 
levels ), It had interrupt capabilities and a second register bank.
The mulplexed bus was almost identical except the 4040 had one additional bus 
operation. I forget the exact difference.
Still, people seem to think that the 4004 wasn't a capable microprocessor. 
Benchmarks showed that much code was faster on the 4004 than the 8008, if 
working in BCD math.
The main reason the 4004 was thought of as just a calculator chip was that the 
chipset that it originally came with, the ROM and RAM, was to use a minimal 
additional amount of custom bus circuity for the Busicom project. I guess it 
wouldn't be a real uP if one didn't have to create bus buffers and address 
decoders.
As an example, Tom Pittman wrote a two pass assembler that ran on the SIM4-01( 
4ea1702.s or 1k of code! ). That seems to be a uP type of process, to me. I 
should note that Tom's code won't run on a 4040 without modification. This was 
because he took advantage of the fact that the stack would overflow on the 
fourth subroutine push. The 4040 had a deeper stack. Still, the 4004 could 
handle text as well as do calculations.
Probably, the main thing that tended to put it in the calculator bucket was the 
restricted instruction memory range, without using some form of bank swapping. 
Its natural memory range was limited to 4096 addresses. But then, the 8080 was 
considered a real uP with similar restrictions to 64K.
Both the 4004 and the 8008 used a multiplexed bus, for the 8008, one had to 
design their own bus interface. The 8080 was what made the type of uP we tend 
to think of. It had separate data and address busses ( note the 8085 and 8086 
both multiplexed the address and data buses. A step back I'd say. )
I'd say things really started to happen when they created the 6502. That 
brought the pricing into a range that people could start small and expand to 
bigger things.
Dwight



From: ED SHARPE 
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2023 7:43 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts 
Cc: dwight 
Subject: Re: [cctalk] Re: Intel 4004(sp?)

Ibad an intellectual 4 offered to me one time that had a 4040 in it. Is t a 
4040 like a 5 but more of the aux chips integrated? Is instruction set the same?

Sent from AOL on 
Android

On Wed, Nov 22, 2023 at 8:34 PM, dwight via cctalk
 wrote:
The Intlec 4 was no more or less a computer than the Altiar or IMSAI was. It 
didn't typically have as much RAM but one could write and run code on it.
As for the F14 processor. For the purpose used, it was likely a DSP. More 
intended to do matrix multiplication using adds and shifts. This would be 
similar to Intel's early try at a DSP.
The F14 processor was said to control the flight surfaces. Like the Intel 2920 
( not to be confused with the AMD bit slice part) it likely ran tight loops of 
signal processing operations using tables of lookup coefficients.
Dwight

[cctalk] It's been a while - retirement project

[Dave Dunfield via cctalk]

Hi, this is "Dave Dunfield" - best known here for being the site owner of
"Daves Old Computers" and the author of "ImageDisk"

No longer have the email I used to use to access cctalk... (hence the
change)

Just in case anyone is interested:

I've been working on a "retirement" project:

I am publishing some 40+ years worth of source code to "stuff I've written".

This includes my DDS products, lots of "internal tools and utilities" and
other misc. "stuff". Of special interest to cctalk members, this include my
  Altair, Horizon, H8, D6809, MOD8, ImageDisk and some other related
material.

Most of it is C (mainly for my own compiler - one of the items), some in
assembly, and a few "custom languages".

Available from my personal site:

   https://dunfield.themindfactory.com

or go to:  "Daves Old Computers" -> "Personal"

Please note that I no longer monitor these forums on a regular basis.
Anyone wishing to reach me, please see the "contact" link on my site.

Dave

-- 
--
Search "Dave's Old Computers" see "my personal" at bottom!

[cctalk] Hayes numeric codes

[RETRO Innovations via cctalk]

I received a bug report today concerning tcpser (the 
Linux/Unix/Windows/MacOS modem emulator) and numeric response codes.


https://github.com/go4retro/tcpser/issues/31

I knew long ago that not all codes and commands were common/consistent 
among modem manufacturers, but I guess I didn't realize even response 
codes differed quite a bit.  After receiving the bug report, I did a bit 
of research, and found, for instance, CONNECT 19200 differs:


Hayes - 14: http://www.bitsavers.org/.../Hayes_44-012_Technical... 

Conexant - 16: 
https://web.archive.org/.../documenta.../dial_up/100498D.pdf 

USRobotics - 85: 
https://support.usr.com/.../5610a/5610a-files/5610a-user.pdf 

Phoenix Contact (industrial modem) - 16: 
https://files.realpars.com/.../um_en_psi_data_basic_modem... 

Supra - 16: https://www.manualslib.com/.../Diamond-Supraexpress-56e.html 

Multi_Tech -19: 
https://www.multitech.com/.../public.../manuals/s000316a.pdf 



I have two questions for the group, if folks can assist:

* Since I purport to be Hayes compatible, I should use the Hayes code 
when available, but the reference above does not go above 38400 bps.  
Did Hayes make a modem that went faster (DTE speed?) and if so, can I 
get a scan of the manual to ensure the codes I am using are the best ones?
* Any other modem manufacturers anyone is aware of, with manuals I can 
check.


Jim

--
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