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In 1971, the Intel Corporation released the first commercially available microprocessor, the 4-bit central processing unit named Intel 4004.
The chip was part of a set of four custom chips which were created specifically for the Japanese company Busicom (originally known as the Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation), for its' Busicom 141-PF printing calculator. The design for the 4004, begun in April 1970, was created by Federico Faggin, who had come over to Intel from Fairchild Semiconductor, where he had designed the first commercial integrated circuit using Silicon Gate Technology, which he himself had invented. Faggin was anxious to utilize this new technology in new areas of chip design and Intel gave him his opportunity with the 4004. Marcian Hoff, better known as "the rock star of Intel" created the architectural proposal for the chip in 1969. It was Hoff (Intel employee number 12) who is credited with coming up with the idea of creating a "universal processor" that would handle all central processing duties, rather than having multiple custom-designed chips to handle different portions of the processing load.
Masatoshi Shima, who worked for Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation at the time, contributed to the architecture and later to the logic design of the 4004. After the launch of the Busicom 141-PF in 1971, Shima joined Intel in 1972 and continued his work with Federico Faggin, helping to create the Intel 8080 CPU, released in 1974.
Two C4004 DIPs with one opened to show the die.
Photo by John Pilge, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The 4004, 4001 ROM, 4002 RAM and the 4003 Shift Register made up the four chips of the Intel MCS-4 chipset, which made it possible to build small computers with a variety of memory and I/O capabilities.
References
The Intel 4004 (top) - Photo By Thomas Nguyen - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47684767
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