Intel’s First Product

Intel introduces its first product: The 3101 Static Random-Access Memory (SRAM) with the following press release. Intel had begun operations a year earlier in August 1968 and was racing to get a product to market. The company pursued Moore’s “Goldilocks strategy,” developing three technologies at once: a single chip bipolar memory, a single chip silicon gate metal-oxide semiconductor memory, and a multi-chip package that wired together four memory chips and today would fall into the advanced packaging category of 2.5D heterogeneous integration. The first was considered too hot a porridge, because it was too easy and would quickly draw competition. The latter too cold a porridge, because it was and would prove to be too difficult. Moore believed the middle, MOS technology, was just right competitively, but decided to hedge Intel’s bet by developing all three. A good bet, because it’s MOS memory was too difficult to come quickly and the company needed a win. It would be a 64-bit bipolar SRAM, the 3101, that would come to market first and bring in the company’s first revenues.
Features included “fast access times of 50 nanoseconds” … and … “power dissipation of 6 milliwatts-per-bit.” It was priced at $99.50 each, or a whopping $1.56 per-bit. This was cutting edge performance, circa 1968.