by Gary A. Kildall

from the January 1980 issue of Dr. Dobb’s Journal

1973…

I was sitting quietly at my desk when Masatoshi Shima hurried into my office at Intel and asked me to follow him to his laboratory down the hall. In the middle of his work bench, among the typical snaggle of jumpers, oscilloscopes and multimeters, sat a binocular microscope with spider-leg probes, all of which were subjecting a minute piece of silicon to help­less investigation. I peered through the microscope at the en­larged regular patterns with particular interest. As a consult­ant, my job was to design and develop certain software tools for Intel. One was Interp/80, a program which simulated Intel’s newly evolved 8080 microprocessor to be used by Intel customers on timesharing systems. As I searched for some­thing recognizable, I hoped my simulation resembled the operation of Shima’s first 8080 chip which had finally come to life.