Vintage Intel P4004 : First commercial microprocessor chip For Sale

This sale is for one Intel P4004 chip as pictured. Generally known as the first commercial microprocessor, the 4004 chip was first created by Intel over fifty years ago as part of a chip set they hoped to sell into the electronic calculator market. The commercial electronic calculator market was driving much of the electronic innovation by the late 1960s into the early 1970s and Intel was competing with a small group of other companies toward filling the demand for higher levels of integration and functionality on a single chip. Although competitors took away most of the calculator business, Intel successfully marketed the 4004 device to electronic engineers and hobbyist's as a general purpose microprocessor. Intel was primarily a memory maker prior to the introduction of the 4004. It changed the direction of the company.The microprocessor or execution unit is a device that will load binary codes into an instruction register and convert them into logical operations that can be performed by the chip. At 2,300 transistors and without built in memory for program or data, the chip only had a few instructions, but at the time it was very impressive. Only about a decade earlier Fairchild Corporation had built the first production silicon integrated circuits from three transistors for the Apollo Space Program.
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