R&D dollars that came from government initiatives. The microprocessor was developed for NASA.
To Crick: You are too stupid to remain silent. You are wrong again asshole:
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office registration number is tough to remember -- 4,942,516 -- and the holder of the patent, a Los Angeles inventor named Gilbert Hyatt, is a virtual unknown. But Hyatt, 52, has suddenly carved a memorable niche for himself in the multibillion-dollar semiconductor industry. Last week, after a 20-year battle with the patent office, the tenacious engineer announced that he had finally received a certificate of intellectual ownership for a single-chip microprocessor that he says he invented in 1968. The announcement sent shock waves throughout the computer industry, which could be forced to pay Hyatt millions of dollars in royalties.
Most business texts credit engineer Ted Hoff at Intel Corp., based in Santa Clara, Calif., with having fathered the microprocessor between 1969 and 1971. But Hyatt asserts that he put together the requisite technology a year earlier at his short-lived company, Micro Computer Inc., whose major investors included Intel's founders, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. Micro Computer invented a digital computer that controlled machine tools, then fell apart in 1971 after a dispute between Hyatt and his venture-capital partners over sharing his rights to that invention. Noyce and Moore went on to develop Intel into one of the world's largest chip manufacturers. "This will set history straight," proclaimed Hyatt. "And this will encourage inventors to stick to their inventions when they're up against the big companies."
A perennially broke inventor, Hyatt could certainly use the cash. In 1968 he quit a well-paying job as a Teledyne engineer to try to solve "the chip problem" out of a makeshift laboratory in the living room of his three- bedroom house in Reseda, Calif. He used all his $10,000 savings before he finally figured out a method to mount a series of tiny computer components on a silicon chip. "I had setbacks, but I never had any doubts," he recalls. "When the inventive drive comes, you have to follow it." Despite his continuing research and perseverance, Hyatt earned less than $40,000 last year as an aerospace consultant. "I'm struggling to make my next mortgage payment," he says.
