History of Microcontrollers: First 50 Years

To understand the impact of microprocessors and controllers one must dial back 50 years to when the computing machine that was most often seen was the store point-of-sale cash registers, which were popularized by the NCR Corporation. In the early 1960s, the integrated circuits (ICs) integration was making a steady progress from small to medium to large scale (SSI, MSI, LSI) densities and mostly standard products. The improvement in process technology brought in the era of very large-scale ICs with metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) devices and custom chip design. In 1971, Intel announced the 4004,1 the industry's first 4-bit microprocessor.