Victor Poor, a largely self-taught computer engineer who played an early role in the development of one of Intel’s first commercial microprocessors, died on Friday in Palm Bay, Fla. He was 79.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, his daughter Noreen Poor said.

While working in San Antonio as an engineer at the Computer Terminal Corporation — later renamed the Datapoint Corporation — in 1969, Mr. Poor approached Intel, then a tiny Silicon Valley chip maker, with a proposal to build a processor for a programmable terminal that Computer Terminal was planning to build.

An Intel engineer, Stanley Mazor, met with Mr. Poor and outlined three approaches to building the processor, including one in which all the circuitry would be on a single chip. At the time, Intel had already begun designing a simpler microprocessor, later known as the 4004, for a Japanese calculator company.

With financing from Computer Terminal, Intel began building a second microprocessor called the 8008. It would lead later to the 8088 family of microprocessors, which was adopted in 1981 by I.B.M. and which helped Intel dominate the microprocessor business.