Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff and Stan Mazor, the trio credited with having invented the microprocessor at Intel Corp, have been elected to the US National Inventors Hall of Fame. The original 4-bit 4004 came about when in mid-1969, Busicom Ltd, a now very late Japanese calculator manufacturer, asked Intel to design chip set for a family of calculators, and according to the San Jose Mercury News, Hoff decided that doing the functions in the five chips commissioned would cost too much for the machines to be competitive, so the team proposed designing a single chip integrating all the functions. Busicom was eventually persuaded, let Intel a $60,000 contract to develop the 4004 and went on to sell about 100,000 calculators. After some debate at Intel, the company decided the design was worth owning, and finally offered to pay $60,000 for the microprocessor design and the rights to market it for non-calculator applications. The word-length was doubled up to 8 bits to make the 8008, that was followed by the 8080, the part that really triggered the microprocessor revolution after Federico Faggin cleaned up the design and put right a crucial weakness to create the Z80 at Zilog Inc, and, with the CP/M operating system, the very first open system.
