In The Beginning ...

S. P. Morse, October 1980


In the beginning Intel created the 4004 and the 8008.  And these processors were without enough memory and throughput.  And Intel said "Let there be an 8080," and there was an 8080 and Intel saw that it was good.  And Intel separated the 8008 market from the 8080 market.

And Intel said, "Let there be an 8085 with an oscillator on the same chip as the processor, and let an on-chip system controller separate the data from the control lines."  And Intel made a firmament and divided the added instructions which were under the firmament from the added instructions which were above the firmament.  And Intel called the first set of instructions RIM and SIM.  And the other instructions Intel never announced.

And Intel said, "Let the market below the 8085 be served with a processor and let on-chip ROM appear."  And Intel called the new processor the 8048.  And the market it served Intel called the low end.  And Intel saw that it was good.

And Intel said "Let a new generation processor serve the midrange market.  And let there be true 16-bit facilities in the midrange.  And let there be one megabyte of memory and efficient interruptible byte-string instructions and full decimal arithmetic."  And Intel saw the collection of all these things, that it was good, and Intel called it the 8086.

And Intel said, "Now let us make a processor in our image, after our likeness, and let it have dominion over the high-end market."  So Intel created the iAPX 432 in his own image, in the image of Intel created he it, data processor and I/O processor created he them.  And Intel blessed them and said unto them "Be fruitful and multiprocess and revolutionize the microprocessor market and have dominion over the Z8000 and the M68000 and over every competitor that enters the market.

And Intel saw everything that he made and, behold, it was good.

[Reprinted from IEEE Computer, Vol 13, No. 10, page 46, October 1980]