Intel's 8008 CPU Celebrates 40th Anniversary

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gilbertfh

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It is hard to believe that it was only 40 years ago this multi legged critter was crawling out of the primordial soup and doing less than a modern day calculator. I can't even imagine where it will be in 40 years more.
 

Antimatter79

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Ahh, takes me back to the good old days, when you really had to know how to use a computer to do anything with it. Every kid that I knew that had a computer also was writing their own little programs out of the books that came with them, and most of us were only 7 to 9 years old. Moving from my first computer with the 8008 to the 8088 a few years later was a huge jump in performance and capability, and with that came my first memories of Sierra games, Falcon, Thexder, etc. Yep, the good ol' days.
 

neiroatopelcc

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[citation][nom]gilbertfh[/nom]It is hard to believe that it was only 40 years ago this multi legged critter was crawling out of the primordial soup and doing less than a modern day calculator. I can't even imagine where it will be in 40 years more.[/citation]

We haven't really gotten far. Our operating systems still take the same amount of time to boot, and people don't seem to have become more productive at work - they're merely required to do more stuff to complete the same task.

 

gilbertfh

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[citation][nom]neiroatopelcc[/nom]We haven't really gotten far. Our operating systems still take the same amount of time to boot, and people don't seem to have become more productive at work - they're merely required to do more stuff to complete the same task.[/citation]
Good inputs but now people don't even have to be at work for it to get accomplished by computers and robots running on modern day chips. To go from nothing to near artificial intelligence that can drive cars, fly airplans and build future computers and other components with little to no input from a humans tells me we have made huge strides.
 

neiroatopelcc

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ye but it hasn't improved anything much.

My old accord from 1990 was a great car on the road. Rode really nice and everything was fine.
Now my new car is one of those computerized things that makes beep noises when the road is cold and tells me when to change gear. But is it fun to drive ? no. It works for the primary purpose of getting me from a to b, but it's not a pleasant experience.
 

jdamon113

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I remember when I first saw a screen with the blinking dos prompt. It was the first IBM- You could not imagine how large and heavy it was, at the time it was just all, and wow. I was very young so a 5000 dollar IBM was not way, but later I got a timex sinclair, I remember it took me half a day to program the code to enable more memory.
The big white boxed of that day, not to many home built yet. But those days there was a certain beauty in the PC world, as small as it was, each maker has something different, now requardless the name on the side or even if you build it yourself. It’s all the same made in China Crap. I miss the, NEW and cool factor. It’s all buzz words now.

 

rosen380

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Well, if you feel that way, you can buy a 1991 Accord on eBay for $700 right now... I'm sure you'll also save quite a bit on insurance :)
 

trumpeter1994

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[citation][nom]neiroatopelcc[/nom]ye but it hasn't improved anything much.My old accord from 1990 was a great car on the road. Rode really nice and everything was fine. Now my new car is one of those computerized things that makes beep noises when the road is cold and tells me when to change gear. But is it fun to drive ? no. It works for the primary purpose of getting me from a to b, but it's not a pleasant experience.[/citation]
I actually drive a 1992 accord lx.... although i suppose you probably go and troll about how it has an armrest attached to the drivers seat as well as an aftermarket radio..... because you know thats all bad
 

tical2399

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[citation][nom]Antimatter79[/nom]Ahh, takes me back to the good old days, when you really had to know how to use a computer to do anything with it. Every kid that I knew that had a computer also was writing their own little programs out of the books that came with them, and most of us were only 7 to 9 years old. Moving from my first computer with the 8008 to the 8088 a few years later was a huge jump in performance and capability, and with that came my first memories of Sierra games, Falcon, Thexder, etc. Yep, the good ol' days.[/citation]

Sounds like the bad old days to me. I'd hate to have an understanding of command line or programming just to do basic tasks. For most of us simpler is better.
 

lca1443

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[citation][nom]neiroatopelcc[/nom]We haven't really gotten far. Our operating systems still take the same amount of time to boot, and people don't seem to have become more productive at work - they're merely required to do more stuff to complete the same task.[/citation]

Seriously? Computers allow me to do the work of about 5-10 engineers from yesteryear.
 
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"The Good Old Days"....... Yeah, there was some cool stuff about it back then , especially the variety of different platforms one could chose from. I found that the "Wintel" / "Apple Power PC" thing of the 1990's too limiting. It sucked the fun out of it for me.

These days, we do have some real choices. The old UNIX Workstations from SUN and other companies that some us used to drool over are a joke next to the SMP based Linux boxen you can put together for a pittance. The graphics, sound and other tools you can get- even the OSS stuff is amazing compared to what you could get then for tens of thousands in today's money. Heck, you can even have solid state storage in RAID 0 !

The old days where fun, perhaps more simple. But so much of what you can do now, and so easily, was impossible, impractical or close to it back then. Ever try running fractals on an old 8-bit ? What my computer could generate on a screen in a small fraction of a second is beyond what my old 6502 or Z80a could do in HOURS.

The old days where fun, but today can be more fun.
 
[citation][nom]jdamon113[/nom]I remember when I first saw a screen with the blinking dos prompt. It was the first IBM- You could not imagine how large and heavy it was, at the time it was just all, and wow. I was very young so a 5000 dollar IBM was not way, but later I got a timex sinclair, I remember it took me half a day to program the code to enable more memory. The big white boxed of that day, not to many home built yet. But those days there was a certain beauty in the PC world, as small as it was, each maker has something different, now requardless the name on the side or even if you build it yourself. It’s all the same made in China Crap. I miss the, NEW and cool factor. It’s all buzz words now.[/citation]

A lot of parts aren't made in China or at least aren't made only in China. For example, Japan makes most of the high quality capacitors and similar parts for many parts of the computer including the good motherboards and video cards. A lot of DRAM is made outside of China. The list does go on. It doesn't go on as long as the list of things made in China, but it does go on pretty long.

[citation][nom]jasoncrussell[/nom]I reckon it could still give the new Bulldozer chip a run for it's money.[/citation]

At least Bulldozer steamrolls Netburst.

[citation][nom]tical2399[/nom]Sounds like the bad old days to me. I'd hate to have an understanding of command line or programming just to do basic tasks. For most of us simpler is better.[/citation]

Yes, because actually understanding what the computer is doing is worthy of hating it. Simpler is only better for people who are too lazy to do it the fast way. Command line is still the fastest way to do things on a computer even like two decades after we got common GUIs (if you count Windows 3.11 and prior as the early common GUIs) for people who know how to use it. In fact, command line still sees common usage by a lot of people for this reason (among other reasons too, but still).

Programming skill isn't a necessary thing even for using command line, but it helps. I still remember a little BASIC myself and even have some QBASIC programs that I wrote and occasionally use. Writing small programs is very easy and doesn't even take much thought. For example, most of the little things I write could be written by anyone with even a day or two of reading a few of the many tutorials on the internet. You could literally write small but useful programs just by looking up a tutorial and spending a few minutes or hours reading and practicing. For example, I have some programs that generate random keyboard characters (I just had to see how quickly I could write three completely different methods for accomplishing this) and some that do other things.
 

shreeharsha

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Dear Webmaster (of Tom's Hardware)

My RSS is not working, I am redirected to a page & informed to send email to webmaster@tomshardware.com, but it's bouncing back to my gmail account.

Regards.
 

__-_-_-__

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but can it run..... linux?

yes it can. the 8bit version runs on 6.5 KHz and these cpu's were available from 200 KHz. isn't linux great?

putting into perspective. 200Khz = 0.2Mhz = 0.0002Ghz.

An overclocked i7 3770K runs at 6.961 GHz. To match the same performance it would need a cluster of 34805 8008's.
 

pedro_mann

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[citation][nom]jasoncrussell[/nom]I reckon it could still give the new Bulldozer chip a run for it's money.[/citation]
Nice try. A bit late for April fools though, eh?
 

gwolfman

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[citation][nom]drwho1[/nom]Intel's 8008 CPU Celebrates 40th Anniversary...Where is my piece of that cake?...[/citation]
The cake is a lie!
 
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@reynod - thanks for the link to the picture. I think my screen displays that in higher precision than the original mask would have needed.
@perry - I think your article confuses 8008 with 8080 in several places. Anything after about 1975 was probably 8080, and CPM certainly never ran on 8008. Despite the numeric similarity, they were quite different chips. The 8086 was the true successor to the 8080. Look at machines like Victor 9000 or Convergent for examples of what Intel 16-bit silicon was already doing well before the IBM PC showed up using the half-bussed and slower 8088 variant.
 
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