Notes

Vintage silicon

21 Oct 2026

Three chips from my vintage CPU collection, oldest first.

Apollo Guidance Computer logic chip

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In its potting compound, on an anti-static bag.

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The same piece from a lower angle.

A logic chip of the kind used in the Apollo Guidance Computer, still set in a piece of potting compound.

• The MIT Instrumentation Laboratory built the computer from integrated circuits at a time when the chip was new and its reliability unproven. It used only one type: a dual three-input NOR gate, six devices on one chip.
• The design came from Fairchild Semiconductor. Philco made the chips under licence and supplied them for all of the Apollo Guidance Computers.
• No Apollo Guidance Computer, in the Command Module or the Lunar Module, had a hardware failure during a mission.

Source: Apollo Guidance Computer and the First Silicon Chips, National Air and Space Museum.

Intel C4004

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White ceramic with grey traces and a gold lid, marked C4004 and K0706.

• Intel introduced the 4004 in November 1971. It was the first commercially available single-chip microprocessor.
• 4-bit, about 2,300 transistors, a 10 µm process and a clock of up to 740 kHz, in a 16-pin package. The C prefix marks the ceramic package.

Intel Pentium A80501-60

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Marked A80501-60, SX835 and INTEL ©1992.

• The A80501 is the first Pentium (P5). Intel launched it in March 1993 at 60 and 66 MHz.
• About 3.1 million transistors on a 0.8 µm BiCMOS process, running at 5 V, in a 273-pin ceramic pin grid array (Socket 4).

Side by side

Chip	Year	Transistors
Apollo logic chip, dual three-input NOR	1960s	6
Intel 4004	1971	about 2,300
Intel Pentium, 60 MHz	1993	about 3.1 million