Busicom

~ the last words ~

Busicom went bankrupt on 28 February 1974, about ten years before I was born, and the processor in whatever I am typing on descends from a chip it paid for. It was a Japanese calculator company. In 1969 it asked a one-year-old memory maker called Intel to build the chips for a new printing calculator, and what came back was the 4004, the first microprocessor sold commercially.

The business went back to a trading house that Wasaburo Kojima opened in Mukden in 1918. Its calculator arm became Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation in April 1945 and made hand-cranked Odhner-type machines for the next two decades. A separate sales company was split off in 1957, and that company is the one that later took the name Busicom, short for business computer. Japanese Wikipedia dates the renaming to 1 October 1970 and the English article to 1967.

In the 1960s it imported the British Anita, the first electronic desktop calculator, and then built its own. The Busicom 161 of 1966 used magnetic core memory and cost 298,000 yen, far below the competition, and it was launched with comparative newspaper ads, which Japanese companies did not run then. According to the Japanese chronology, the chairman of an industry association and a section chief at MITI both asked for the launch to be called off. When the 161 passed a 15 percent share, Mitsubishi Electric stopped increasing its supply of diodes and production stalled.

By 1968 NCR was selling Busicom machines worldwide under its own badge. The company was short of money and unusually willing to buy the newest American silicon, and in 1971 that produced two firsts within months. In January came the LE-120A, a pocket calculator built on a single Mostek chip, priced at 89,800 yen. In October came the 141-PF with the Intel chipset inside, at 159,800 yen.

~ the record ~

~ twelve chips down to four ~

The 141-PF design came from a young Busicom engineer, Masatoshi Shima, who had laid it out as a small decimal computer with its behavior held in ROM, so that one set of chips could serve several products. Busicom signed a provisional agreement with Intel in April 1969 and the full development contract on 6 February 1970. Shima's plan needed twelve custom chips. Intel's Ted Hoff, who had been working with a PDP-8, proposed four: a general-purpose processor with memory chips around it, and a longer program to make up the difference.

Busicom's management accepted. Federico Faggin, newly arrived from Fairchild with its silicon-gate process, did the chip design, and Shima spent months at Intel working on the logic beside him. Working chips reached Busicom in early 1971. Shima later joined Intel himself and then followed Faggin to Zilog, where the two of them made the Z80.

Paying for it had been a problem of its own. The Japanese account says permission to send dollars to Intel was slow to come from MITI and the finance ministry, and it records one MITI official telling the company that a small firm or two going bankrupt did not trouble the ministry. Tadashi Sasaki of Sharp, who had steered Busicom toward Intel in the first place, is said to have quietly arranged money for the project.

~ what the chip cost ~

The contract gave Busicom exclusive rights to the design. By 1971 calculator prices were falling fast, and Busicom asked Intel for a cheaper chipset. Intel agreed on one condition. In May 1971 Robert Noyce returned Busicom's $60,000 development payment, and in exchange Intel could sell the 4004 to anyone for anything except calculators. On 15 November 1971 Intel advertised the MCS-4 family in Electronic News under the line "a new era of integrated electronics".

~ pen watches and power lines ~

The end took two days. On 27 February 1974 the manufacturing company, Nippon Calculating Machine, applied to the Osaka District Court for reorganization, and on the 28th Busicom's second bill was dishonored, which in Japan ends a company's bank credit. It was the first large failure in the Japanese calculator industry.

A court composition was approved in September 1975 and a much smaller Busicom carried on in Tokyo under Yoshio Kojima. It sold a ballpoint pen with a quartz clock in it, and in the late 1980s host systems for dial-up BBSes. Power-line modems followed in 1995, and the Wayback Machine holds the company's site from August 2006. In Britain the Bristol dealer Broughtons had bought the trade name in 1974 and sold business machines under it until 2016. The 141-PF was listed as Information Processing Technology Heritage in Japan in March 2012.

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