Pull out the candles and champagne, because the Intel 4004 is celebrating a major birthday today -- the big four-oh. That's right, it's been exactly four decades since Intel unveiled the world's first commercially available CPU, with an Electronic News ad that ran on November 15th, 1971. It all began in 1969, when Japan's Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation asked Intel to create 12 chips for its Busicom
