Ahoy, DECmate II! the little PDP-8 that could (opens in new tab)

Oh this is a little surprising: Intersil’s 1975 development of a pure CMOS PDP-8 CPU was completed independently of DEC, intending not only to create a microprocessor of their own but also one with a presumably guaranteed market … its features included moving the Extended Arithmetic Element (EAE) option on-chip for multiplication and division. Intersil sampled and sold the IM6100 openly, seeing its first use in Pacific Cyber/Metrix’s long-lived PCM-12 computer line, but nevertheless offered i...