After using a sibling’s Ti-99/4a, my first real “puter” was a hand-me-down PC/XT with an 8088, CGA, 256k RAM and dual 5-1/4” floppy drives. Much appreciation for the nostalgic post.
Little unknown story: the 8088 was designed in Israel, but was inspired by Italian physicist Federico Faggin. [0], who invented its predecessor, the 4004.
You can see in his foundation page [1] that the 4004 had its initials (FF) circuit-stamped in the board.
That history is a bit muddled so let me clarify. I'm a big fan of Federico Faggin, but Stan Mazor, Ted Hoff, and Masatoshi Shima are also co-inventors of the 4004. Next, the 4004 had approximately nothing to do with later processors including the 8088. The 8008 was built to copy the design of the TTL-based Datapoint 2200 computer. (TI produced its copy, the TMX 1795, before Intel produced the 8008.) Datapoint rejected the 8008 so Intel sold it as a product. The 8008 was followed by the 8080 and 8085 and then extended to the 16-bit 8086. The 8086 was intended as a temporary stopgap until Intel completed the iPAX 432, their flagship processor. (The "micromainframe" 432 was a failure.) Intel Israel created a lower-cost version of the 8086 with an 8-bit bus. This was the 8088, which was used in the IBM PC, creating the success of the x86 architecture.
As the designer of the 8080 and Z80, that kind of makes Faggin the father of the brain of the Game Boy.
And I wasn’t aware so many Intel processors were developed in Israel.
I feel like if we walked down the entire supply chain and design lineage of a device like the Game Boy, we’d see a wonderful collaboration of people from many regions across time. All contributing to keep me quiet on long car rides.
