alt Hacker NewsThe anecdote about the 16-pin religion and the reluctance to use more pins is so good. It's often assumed that (later) successful companies were always making fantastic decisions in the earlier days, when in reality there were a few bizarre and harmful assumptions that were holding it back and needed to be forced out in order for rationality to prevail.
Replies
The reluctance to use more pins is very understandable.
At the time, Intel was primarily a memory manufacturer, and they had vertically integrated the complete workflow for anything that could fit into a 16-pin DIP. Anything that didn't, required them to outsource testing and packaging, or purchase expensive new machines. When CPUs were still being pushed against the wishes of upper management ("A computer has only one CPU but lots of memory chips, so the memory is a better business"), it was a hard sell to invest lots of money for an uncertain market.
To be fair packaging used to be very expensive in US. I remember one of Asianometry? videos touching on Japanese businessman traveling to Texas in ?seventies? and learning how expensive lead frames were while he could manufacture and ship them overseas at fraction of the cost. Sadly I cant find that specific episode anymore :(