Stanley Mazor is an American engineer who works with tiny electronic parts. He helped create the design of the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, along with Ted Hoff, Masatoshi Shima, and Federico Faggin.

Early years

As a young man, Mazor's family moved to California, where he attended Oakland High School and graduated in 1959. He began studying at San Francisco State University (SFSU), focusing on math as his main subject. In his free time, he studied helicopter design and construction. At SFSU, Mazor met his future wife, Maurine, and they got married in 1962. Around the same time, he became interested in computers. He learned to program SFSU's IBM 1620 computer, worked as a professor's assistant, and taught other students how to use the technology. At the same time, he studied computer architecture by reading technical manuals outside of school.

Career summary

In 1964, he worked as a programmer for Fairchild Semiconductor. Later, he became a computer designer in the Digital Research Department. There, he helped patent "Symbol," a computer language. However, the "Symbol" computer was never patented as a complete unit. The U.S. Patent Office lists four patented parts of the system: 3,643,225: Memory Control System; 3,643,227: Job Flow and Multiprocessor Operation Control System; 3,577,130: Means for Limiting Field Length of Computed Data; and 3,647,348: Hardware-Oriented Paging Control System. Mazor's name appears on the last patent.

In 1969, he joined Intel Corporation, a company that was one year old. He worked with Ted Hoff on a project to design the architecture of a microprocessor, often called a "computer-on-a-chip." This idea was based on a concept Hoff had developed earlier. The Japanese calculator company Busicom asked Intel to design and build a new set of chips. Mazor, along with Faggin, Hoff, and Masatoshi Shima of Busicom, helped create the architecture and instruction set for the Intel 4004, a groundbreaking chip.

At first, Intel's marketing team was hesitant to sell these products to general customers. Hoff and Mazor worked with Faggin, the 4004's designer and project leader, to promote the product and develop a support plan the company could accept. In 1971, Intel officially announced the Intel 4004.

After six years as a computer designer, Mazor moved to Brussels, Belgium, where he worked for Intel as an application engineer, helping customers use the company's products. He returned to California the next year and began teaching. First, he taught in Intel's Technical Training group. Later, he taught at Stanford University and the University of Santa Clara. His teaching work took him to places like Stellenbosch, South Africa; Stockholm, Sweden; and Nanjing, China. In 1984, Mazor joined Silicon Compiler Systems. In 2008, he became the Training Director at BEA Systems.

Publications

In 1993, while working at Synopsys, he wrote a book about chip design language with Patricia Langstraat. The book was called A Guide to VHDL. Throughout his career, Mazor has also written fifty articles.

Recognition

He has received many awards and honors with his co-inventors Hoff, Faggin, and Shima. These include the Ron Brown American Innovator Award, the 1997 Kyoto Prize, and being added to the National Inventors Hall of Fame. In 2009, the four were inducted as Fellows of the Computer History Museum for their work as the team that created the Intel 4004, the first commercial microprocessor in the world. In 2010, Mazor and his co-inventors Hoff and Faggin were given the National Medal of Technology by President Barack Obama.