[HN Gopher] Revolutions and NAND Gates, Eight Cents, Wholesale
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Revolutions and NAND Gates, Eight Cents, Wholesale
Author : NaOH
Score : 12 points
Date : 2021-03-05 20:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (interconnected.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (interconnected.org)
| nynx wrote:
| What a beautiful website.
| carapace wrote:
| Interesting thing about the _switch_ as a computing device is
| that it has no intrinsic size limits (other than physics itself).
|
| The vast majority of machines cannot fulfill their function below
| a certain size. A car or a stove can't be miniaturized but "pure"
| switches can.
|
| - - - -
|
| > And that's another observation that could only have been made
| closer to the start than today, with the perspective to see the
| before and after: if it served to entrench and not upend the
| existing class system, was the computer revolution a revolution
| at all?
|
| Well, _which_ existing class system, eh? Ask the East coast
| elites what they think of the new upstart West coast elites.
| Silicon Valley is young, the people who won big out here _are_
| the challenge to the old class system. It might feel like FAANG
| are "the establishment" but the fight is still raging.
|
| As far as liberating the lower classes to upend the existing
| class system, yeah, that idea sure turned out to be incredibly
| naive. :(
| quantified wrote:
| Elites still be elites. West Coast elites pick from Stanford
| instead of Yale. Desk jockeys win out against hand and body
| workers. It's the same, just spread westward.
|
| What new things have been enabled that might affect class? I'm
| not sure that "influencers" obtain a higher class level.
| They're an interesting beneficiary of the technology shifts,
| but it's tech more as publishing platform than tech as tech.
|
| New commerce platforms allow a different patterns of buyers and
| sellers, but we've always had a variety of merchants.
|
| The ability to own and apply statistical models as produced by
| ML seems like elite. Are the people who build and own these
| drawn from lower-than-elite classes? I think the VCs and other
| investors that prosper from them are the definition of elite
| class.
| guidoism wrote:
| I discovered Kidder's book while I was digging into what
| microcode actually was. I had been thinking about what a huge
| impedance mismatch it was to write in C targeting an abstract
| machine that resembles of a PDP-11 and expecting the CPU to
| translate the instructions for that abstract machine into an
| architecture is that drastically different.
|
| Microcode is the magic, it's the compiler internals that we don't
| have access to. I really wish we could get a modern CPU with a
| writable microcode store so research could happen in the open.
| genmon wrote:
| Post author here. Here's what prompted me to write it:
|
| Tracy Kidder's book says that a NAND gate cost eight cents in
| 1981. The latest iPhone has 11.8 billion transistors. So the chip
| at the heart of each phone is $1.4 billion in parts, no margin.
| That's 1981 prices, 2021 money accounting for inflation.
| quantified wrote:
| Sounds right, a 7400 TTL chip held 4 of them and probably cost
| about $0.32.
| kabdib wrote:
| I read _Soul of a New Machine_ in college, and then wound up
| working for a company that actually used the machine that the
| book was about (the Eclipse MV /8000) for cross-development of
| video games. This was 1982.
|
| I was used to a Unix-and-Emacs-on-a-VT100 environment, and while
| the MV/8000 didn't run Unix or have a port of Emacs, its OS and
| DG's standard screen editor were surprisingly pleasant to use,
| and the shell was pretty nice. It even had a C compiler (a big
| deal for the time). My only issue was that the department I was
| in used the machine for regular office work as well as
| engineering, and it was heavily loaded during the day with a
| bunch of terrible "office" software. My assembles took 45 minutes
| turnaround during the day, but only 5 minutes at night, and guess
| who didn't see the sun for their first six months at Atari?
|
| If you liked this book, I also recommend:
|
| Lundstrom's _A Few Good Men from Univac_ (essentially a biography
| of Seymour Cray)
|
| Murray's _The Supermen_ (well . . . ditto :-) )
| amelius wrote:
| > if it served to entrench and not upend the existing class
| system, was the computer revolution a revolution at all?
|
| No, engineers don't care about such things as class, and simply
| do as they are told by their superiors as long as the task is
| technically interesting. Therefore, there was no revolution in
| this sense.
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