Simplified design A key concept in the Busicom design was that the program control and ALU were not aimed specifically at the calculator market, it was the program in ROM that turned it into a calculator. The original idea was that the company could use the same chips with different amounts of shift-register RAM and program ROM to produce a range of calculating machines. Hoff was struck by how closely the Busicom's instruction set architecture matched that of general-purpose computers. He began to consider whether a truly general-purpose processor could be made cheaply enough to be used in a calculator. When later asked where he got the ideas for the architecture of the first microprocessor, Hoff related that Plessey, "a British tractor company",Possibly he had confused the Plessey name with that of Massey Ferguson, makers of agricultural machinery. had donated a minicomputer to Stanford, and he had "played with it some" while he was there. Tadashi Sasaki attributes the idea to break the calculator into four parts to an unnamed woman from the Nara Women's College present at a brainstorming meeting that was held in Japan prior to his first meeting with Intel.
Simplified design A key concept in the Busicom design was that the program control and ALU were not aimed specifically at the calculator market, it was the program in ROM that turned it into a calculator. The original idea was that the company could use the same chips with different amounts of shift-register RAM and program ROM to produce a range of calculating machines. Hoff was struck by how closely the Busicom's instruction set architecture matched that of general-purpose computers. He began to consider whether a truly general-purpose processor could be made cheaply enough to be used in a calculator. When later asked where he got the ideas for the architecture of the first microprocessor, Hoff related that Plessey, "a British tractor company",Possibly he had confused the Plessey name with that of Massey Ferguson, makers. of agricultural machinery. had donated a minicomputer to Stanford, and he had "played with it some" while he was there. Tadashi Sasaki attributes the idea to break the calculator into four parts to an unnamed woman from the Nara Women's College present at a brainstorming meeting that was held in Japan prior to his first meeting with Intel