Busicom

Busicom was a Japanese company that owned the rights to Intel's first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, which they created in partnership with Intel in 1970.

Busicom asked Intel to design a set of integrated circuits for a new line of programmable electronic calculators in 1969. In doing this, they spurred the invention of Intel's first microprocessor to be commercialized, the Intel 4004. Busicom owned the exclusive rights to the design and its components in 1970 but shared them with Intel in 1971.

Two companies have done business as "Busicom" over the years; the Nippon Calculating Machine Corp, Ltd and subsequently Broughtons & Co.(Bristol) Ltd of the UK.

The Nippon Calculating Machine Corp was incorporated in 1945 and changed its name in 1967 to Business Computer Corporation, Busicom. Due to a recession in Japan in 1974, Busicom became the first major Japanese company in the calculator industry to fail. Originally, they made Odhner type mechanical calculators and then moved on to electronic calculators always using state of the art designs. They made the first calculator with a microprocessor for their top of the line machines and they were the first to make calculators with an all-in-one calculator chip, the Mostek MK6010, for their line of inexpensive machines.

One of their last mechanical calculators is the HL-21, an Odhner type machine. Their first calculator with a microprocessor is the Busicom 141-PF. Their entry based calculators, the Busicom LE-120A (Handy-LE) and LE-120S (Handy), were the first to fit in a pocket and also the first calculators to use an LED display.

In order to limit production cost, Busicom wanted to design a calculator engine that would be based on a few integrated circuits (ICs), containing some ROMs and shift registers and that could be adapted to a broad range of calculators by just changing the ROM IC chips. Busicom's engineers came up with a design that required 12 ICs and asked Intel, a company founded one year earlier in 1968 for the purpose of making solid state random-access memory (RAM), to finalize and manufacture their calculator engine. People who were influential in convinicing Busicom to switch to using microprocessors were Tadashi Sasaki and Robert Noyce.

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