inventor on the patent. Fairchild announced the F8 in September 1974, which led almost immediately to a lawsuit from GI for the misappropriation of trade secrets. As the case dragged on, in February 1976 Fairchild announced a cross-licensing deal with Olympia for the F8, meaning they now had legal access to the original CP3F design and GI's lawsuit was neutered, at least in technical details. Very little information on the CP3F is available, but it is widely believed by industry observers that the CP3F is the basis for the F8 design. The court case dragged on into the 1980s, but with no technical issues of note, it had no effect on the sales of the F8. Production The first engineering samples of the F8 were sent out in April 1975, with volume shipments beginning that fall. At the time, the electronics industry demanded second source arrangements as insurance that the design would not disappear if the designing company went bankrupt or simply lost interest in the design. Fairchild announced such an agreement with Mostek in June 1975. The agreement allowed both companies to continue independent development of the design. The F8 was introduced at a single-unit price of , making it less expensive than contemporary designs like the Intel 8080 or Motorola 6800 which were at least twice that price. Additionally, the minimal system included four 8-bit input/output ports, a small amount of RAM, and of ROM. Together, they allowed simple applications to be built with only two ICs. In contrast, designs like the 8080 supported this sort of functionality using separate dedicated-purpose ICs, often dozens, so an F8 system could be implemented for far less total cost. Offsetting this to some degree was that the program ROM in the PSU was masked onto the chips early in the production process, which required separate production lines for each customer. As a result, setup fees were on the order of . Although the F8 was marketed as a general-purpose microprocessor, historically it represents the first purpose-designed 8-bit microcontroller, a design that implements a complete computer system on a small number of ICs. Its release had a profound influence on the market, and led to the introduction of dedicated microcontrollers from most other vendors, among them the Intel MCS-48, Motorola MC6801 and MOS 6510, all of which combined various systems formerly left to the circuit board designer to implement. These examples, however,