The Next Century of Computing

While I’ve been down the rabbit hole of nostalgic computing, others are looking at the coming century of computing.

TL;DR (but please do read the post, as it’s good), the end of Moore’s Law is going to set off a “Cambrian Explosion” of new hardware designs.

I’ve not seen that prediction before, and it seems likely to me. In looking back at the 1970s era of personal computing, what held it back wasn’t just the 8-bit processors and minimal amounts of memory, but the high cost of custom chips, a.k.a. ASICs.

Here in 2022 we have companies that let anyone design a PCB at home, and have physical copies of that PCB delivered in days. No doubt some fab within this decade will do the same for chip designs, first at a cost medium size companies can afford, then startups, then for every home hobbyist.

It took me only a few hours to code up my 652402 idea in Verilog, and from Verilog to working silicon is only a few more hours of work, most of which can be guided, if not fully automated, with software.

I came across the word “transmogrify” today and wondered if the author first learned it reading Calvin & Hobbes, as I don’t recall ever seeing the word before that. Luckily for us denizens of the 21st Century, we can ask Google’s Ngrams the popularity of a word back a few centuries: Turns out no, the word isn’t new to Calvin & Hobbes. It was used to describe...

Ars Technia published a lovely history of the changes in market leadership in computers, tables, and smartphones. My takeaway is another reminder of how much more difficult foresight is than hindsight. Especially when I was reading the prospectus to the Apple IPO, where the risks were about the TRS-80, Atari 400, Commodore PET, and other competitors of the day. We all think of Apple today as a...

I always through the company name Intel was a just the first five letter of “intellegent” or “intellegence”. Wrong. It’s a portmanteau of INTegrated ELectronics. This was one of the many tidbits of knowledge that have shown up in The Snowball, the “other” biography of Warren Buffett. Turns out Warren had the opportunity to invest $100,000 into the initial...

Do you remember my journey down the 8-bit computing rabbit hole? Well… if you are going to do something for fun like designing an upgraded 1976 CPU and writing a 1979 personal computer operating system, you might as well go all the way and write the accompanying book too, in the matching late-1970s style. I read a lot of fan fiction in my free time, but I don’t recall ever seeing much...

Apple went public in December 1980. They successfully raised $100 million at $22 per share. They’ve split those shares 2:1 three times since then, and 7:1 once, and 4:1 once, plus they’ve bought back a lot of shares, but roughly that $22 share today is worth at least $40,000. If you read this blog, you know that rise in value isn’t what mosts interests me, but rather the fact...