The International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) celebrates the language’s potential for weirdness. One of the recent winners coded a gate-level Intel 4004 emulator along with the peripheral chips needed to make a Busicom calculator. Because it’s an IOCCC submission, the program had to be as short as possible: the entire emulator fits in 4,004 bytes of C source code.
We had processors before the Intel 4004, but it was the first single-chip (i.e., “micro”) processor. Intel could’ve made an ASIC for Busicom, but the company realized that a programmable chip could address additional customers’ needs. Thus, the microprocessor was born, and the world hasn’t been the same. (Somebody else would’ve inevitably built a microprocessor, but Intel was the first.)
For more on the Intel 4004 emulator, see Nicholas Carlini’s discussion of how he developed it. See also the IOCCC web page and the Our Favorite Universe YouTube channel, which discusses the IOCCC winners.