NATS 1700 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Intel 8080, Central Processing Unit, Minicomputer
31 Mar 2016
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1965: dec"s pdp-8: first commercially successful minicomputer, small and cheap, designed to offer smaller businesses an affordable alternative to mainframes, performed and amazing amount of duties with very little memory. An integrated circuit (ic) etched in a silicon semiconductor chip that could process programs, remember information, or preform mathematical and logical operations on data. Contains the central processing unit (cpu) of the computer: basic logic, storage (memory) and arithmetic functions of a computer. 1973: intel launches the powerful 8080 microprocessor. Used as the heart of computer systems (290,000 instructions/second) The power of computing for a given price doubles every 18 months. In ten years, the power of the technology increases by a factor of 100. There were two groups who helped put the pc on the map. The techno-enthusiastic computer hobbyists in the us and in canada who created a demand for the new technology.
