Unearthing the first microprocessor article
1. If on campus open a web browser and go to IEEE Xplore. If you are home, go to myJH and download the CISCO VPN login to the campus network. Then go to IEEE Xplore.
2. Click on Advanced Search.
3. Enter the information as shown here (in this instance I decided to search years 1970 to 1980 and search IEEE Periodicals and IEEE Conference proceedings. Enter "intel microprocessor" as the keyword or phrase. Be creative and think about how to find things. Here I assumed that there is no microprocessors before 1970 and also limit my search to a decade because o/w the search may generate a lot of entries. The browser will look like this.
4. Looks like in the middle of the page with the search results, there is a paper that appears to be an overerview of Intel processors for the decade 1970 to 1980. Download it and check it out. Looks like we may have struck a good paper. Look at the references. Seems to me that #2 is the original paper on the 4004 (a paper in IEEE 1972 Region Six Conference, 1972 pp. 8-11). Also looks like #11 is the 8080 microprocessor paper (but it is not obviours from the citation; could be the 8008). This last article is published in the Solid-state Circuits conference Feb. 1974, pp. 56-57.
5. Let's go to find this original paper. Go back to IEEE Explore and select now conference proceedings. Browse by keyword in this instance "solid state circuits" as is shown here.
6. Go to the Solid-State Circuits Conference, Digest of Technical Papers, 1974 (somewhere towards the bottom of the page). When you click on the link you will get something like this. It will open to pages that correspond to the articles from that conference. On the bottom of the page clickon the little blue box with the number 2 in it to go to the second page. Keep doing this with the third page and so on, till you find the front cover (fourth page/set of papers) and look for the contents. Your screen will look like this. Download the pdf file of the front cover that includes authors, articles and page information and look for Shima or Faggin -a graduate student of Carver Mead and co-founder of Synaptics (yes the company that makes touchpads for laptops) and also Foveon a company that makes CMOS imagers. Actually turns out that by luck the paper on the 8080 microprocessor with Shima as the first author and Faggin as co-author is the first paper on this page! On the third page/set of papers there is a paper that describes probably what should be considered the first MOS imager, a whooping 8 x 6 array! Check it out as well. And not far from here is THE FIRST CMOS microprocessor the RCA COSMAC! Ok are we lucky or something!
7. Turns out if you go to the 50th anniversary website of the IEEE Solid State Circuits Conference and visit the ISSCC 50th Museum you can get a lot of help in doing the homework assignment. You get at least seven good links to papers describing microprocessors since 1972!
6. Time taken to do this about an hour and a half (including the time to write this report, clip pictures, browse other papers and prepare this tutorial :-)