On November 15, 1971, he appeared in the American magazine Electronic News for the first time, the announcement of the birth of a new era for the history of computers: the microprocessor. To give an idea of the turning point, before then computers were huge and without microprocessors we wouldn’t have smartphones and smart cars and a lot of other things that we take for granted today. Behind this invention there is a great Italian, even if in the United States sometimes they still pretend not to know: Federico Faggin.
But let’s go back to the announcement (photo below): “A New Era of Integrated Electronics”; and then with the exclamation point “A micro-programmable computer on a chip!”. The first microchip was therefore the Intel 4004. And if you go today on the Intel website found lots of historical information: it is explained that the project had started in 1969 when the Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation had turned to Intel (a startup, but of considerable caliber given the founders, born the previous year) to design a series of chips for a calculator; the solution proposed by Intel were 4 chips, the MCS-4, which had a single CPU at the center, the 4004 in fact. In 1971 Intel repurchased the rights from Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation and on November 15 launched the Intel 4004. Not a word on the site is still there today about the makers of this invention. The head of the project was Federico Faggin, who in 1971 was 30 years old: from Vicenza, he joined Olivetti at a very young age, but he left early to specialize in Physics; he had joined the Sgs Fairchild of Agrate Brianza which at a certain point had sent him to California, to the parent company.
In 1970 Faggin joined Intel and became head of the microchip project. For about 3 years he made a formidable contribution to Intel and to the development of microchips, until in 1974 he left the company to take other paths. This should not have made him lose his gratitude and above all the truth of the facts. Which instead happened until, many years later, the American president Barack Obama awarded him the gold medal for innovation for the work on the 4004. Credit from Faggin’s wife, Elvia, who showed incredible tenacity for her husband’s work to be recognized. All the events are told by Faggin himself in a nice autobiographical book recently released (Silicon, Mondadori), from which I quote the following passage: “Now in the Museum of the Inventors Hall of Fame I am correctly presented in the following way: Federico Faggin joined Intel as the main designer and the leader of the team that designed the first microprocessor. As Emile Zola wrote, the truth is on the march and nothing will stop it. Often, however, it is necessary to fight hard to assert it. And that’s what Elvia has done all these years. I know without hers determination and its I commit in the first person I would have risked to end up like many inventors ignored and mistreated in life and perhaps recognized and exalted centuries later “.
Thanks Elvia, and thanks Federico.
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