The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

by Richard Hamming

I began mainly talking about general-purpose computers, but I gradually took up discussing the use of a general-purpose computer as a special-purpose device to control things, such as the cyclotron and laboratory equipment. One of the main steps happened when someone in the business of making integrated circuits for people noted that instead of making a special chip for each of several customers, he could make a four-bit general-purpose computer and then program it for each special job (intel 4004). He replaced a complex manufacturing job with a programming job, though of course the chip still had to be made, but now it would be a large run of the same four-bit chips. Again this is the trend I noted earlier, going from hardware to software to gain the mass production of a variable product—always using the same general purpose computer. The four-bit chip was soon expanded to eight-bit chips, then 16, etc., so now some chips have 64-bit computers on them!