[HN Gopher] Faraday and Babbage: Semiconductors and Computing in...
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       Faraday and Babbage: Semiconductors and Computing in 1833
        
       Author : klelatti
       Score  : 25 points
       Date   : 2022-09-18 15:15 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (thechipletter.substack.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (thechipletter.substack.com)
        
       | mikewarot wrote:
       | Interesting historical footnotes, but without a handy AC power
       | supply, even a rectifier isn't much use. Note that most (but not
       | all) of Faraday's devices produced direct current.
       | 
       | Babbage's failure to ship a working product set back computing
       | about 100 years.
        
         | hinkley wrote:
         | People who are just slightly ahead of their time tend to have
         | competitors, people who looked at the same world and have
         | essentially the same idea, and then it's down to whether we
         | think Liebniz or Newton invented it, or whether we confusingly
         | credit one but rely on the techniques of the other (see also
         | Edison & Tesla).
         | 
         | I think history has unfortunately proven Babbage a dreamer. He
         | had no contemporary who could swoop in and profit from his slow
         | progress, because his work was not obvious/compelling to anyone
         | else of his caliber.
        
         | mannykannot wrote:
         | Computing as we know it (post Moore's law) depends on
         | semiconductor technology. It is quite a stretch to suppose
         | that, if Babbage had produced a working device, then the period
         | of Moore's law expansion would have occurred 100 years earlier,
         | given that it depended on the development of semiconductor
         | devices, which in turn depended on developing a quantum theory
         | of condensed matter.
        
       | westurner wrote:
       | Timeline of Quantum Computing (1960-)
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_quantum_computing_...
       | 
       | 1960-1883 = 77 years later
        
         | westurner wrote:
         | From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31996743
         | https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-31996743 :
         | 
         | > _Qubit#Physical_implementations:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
         | /Qubit#Physical_implementations_
         | 
         | > - _note the "electrons" row of the table_
         | 
         | >> _See also: "Quantum logic gate"
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic_gate_
        
       | JoeAltmaier wrote:
       | Ah! A previous discussion about steampunk computers after the
       | invention of photography, was dismissed because no
       | semiconductors. But Faraday knew about them! A reasonable fiction
       | could be written where steam engines are contemporaneous with
       | CPUs, perhaps as huge structures of suspended film or some such!
        
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