I'm building a stained glass window for our front entrance, as a sometimes chip designer it's going to be a half adder (so much much smaller than a pentium) - the big challenge is showing all the layers (si, implantation, poly, metal, vias etc) I'm only doing 1 level of metal. The result is going to be more of a thin layered sculpture than a traditional stained glass window

A fun full-circle. The Jacquard loom was influential for input for early computers, and now the computer is influencing the output of looms

I thought the same thing reading this! I'm currently reading Prisoner's Dilemma by William Poundstone, which details the life of John von Neumann. According to his brother Nicholas, von Neumann likely got the idea to use punch cards for computers from the Jacquard loom. One of his father's (Maxwell von Neumann) clients at the turn of the century was a Jacquard loom manufacturer, and Max would evidently discuss his work with his kids everyday over supper.

Ah, you're right. Babbage's Analytic Engine was designed to use punch cards, and I totally forgot about the Hollerith Machine that I read about just last year. I wonder what other false information Poundstone's book has. Thanks for the heads up!

Not only did Babbage's Analytical Engine use punched cards, it was specifically inspired by the Jacquard Loom, as Babbage was a massive fan of it (and owned a portrait made on one!)

I laughed at the bit where the gallery picked the wrong side of the rug to display, but this got me thinking -- presumably all the die photos we see are from the etched side of the wafer, what does it look like on the other side? Is it just all flat?

The other side is plain gray silicon; I've looked at the back side of dies by mistake many times. (Intel is starting to do power through the back side, which would make the back more interesting.)

Note that it's entirely transparent to some wavelengths of light, which is why a lot of die shots are taken from the backside, as it allows doing them non-destructively. You just cannot use visible light.

"Such hearts, such brains, would be unable to comprehend that one's attachment to a masterpiece may be utterly overwhelming, especially when it is the underside of the weave that entrances the beholder and only begetter, whose own past intercoils there with the fate of the innocent author." --- Nabokov, "Pale Fire"

As a hobby hand-spinner and occasional weaver who’s been in IT my entire working life, and interested in learning more about what my home country has done to the nations that were already there, this article is excellent in all regards.

I get the feeling Intel needed to "bribe" the Navajo by ordering this work. Why did they need to do that? Was it part of an agreement with tribe leadership?

I think it's more likely that someone at Intel thought, "You know what would be cool? A rug that looked like the Pentium die." Note that unlike Fairchild, Intel's plant is not on Navajo land so there are no tribal agreements.

It's actually quite common for large companies to commission artworks inspired by their products; American companies frequently reach out to tribal artists for the uniqueness of their artistic style. Your comment is pretty depressing -- despite the clear mastery demonstrated in this art, you're insinuating a nefarious plot involving a long-scapegoated population.

Trying to sort out aerospace companies is always a mess. I got the dates mostly right but reversed the timeline. GM acquired Hughes Aircraft in 1985, forming the Hughes Electronics unit which consisted of Hughes Aircraft and Delco Electronics. Hughes Aircraft acquired General Dynamics' missile business in 1992 to form the Hughes Missile System Company. In 1994, Hughes Electronics combined three operations into the Hughes Aerospace and Electronics Company (still a unit of GM). In 1997, Raytheon acquired the military business of Hughes Electronics Corporation from General Motors for $9.5 billion. At least I think that's what happened :-)

I had a dual Pentium II board (made by Tyan, with an Adaptec Raid Option slot) but I don't recall ever seeing a dual P54C board. Did a mainstream motherboard maker ever release one, to your knowledge?

Pentium 60MHz was P5 though, not P54C ... if I'm not mistaken. IIRC the slowest P54C was the 75MHz one as they all had 1.5x multiplier or greater? Again, I wouldn't rule out my memory being wrong.

That story about Fairchild manufacturing at Shiprock is fascinating and heartbreaking. Glad to see it so thoughtfully researched and presented.

And as sad it is, they cycle as has repeated itself and its still a sad situation around Shiprock. I'm someone who lives within the general area and poverty is still saturating the Navajo community. To make things worse the oilfield in the area has shifted to Texas. And within the last year the Four Corners Power Plant (PNM) and Navajo Mine (BHP) have shut down. These have been 2 extremely large employers of the area for the Navajo people since the 70's. Lots of businesses in neighboring towns like Farmington and Gallup have shuddered. And a large amount of people (who could afford to) have moved to places like Phoenix and Denver so they don't get stuck being part of the situation.

As a programmer and Shepherdess I can tell you that sheep have enough intelligence as is. Contrary to popular belief they are not stupid but certainly have a very different world view.

This sounds like the backstory for Alan Dean Foster's "Cyber Way". I enjoyed the novel, didn't realize how well rooted it was in actual history.

I’ve long considered “hard tech” (semiconductors, high end manufacturing, aerospace, etc) to be the embodiment of our culture, because it’s not something you can just start doing, it takes generations of improvement to make anything worthwhile.

Wow. They have got to turn this into a 99% Invisible podcast episode. (if you stopped at the weaving - which is incredible in its own right - you missed the much more amazing story)

This how I have always thought of the Giza plateau and other temple sites. They look like different digital components or circuits attached to each other. It was easy to convince myself that they were indeed designing some type of deep logic within the structures.

The oldest datasets produced by humans intended to be read by machines. With our advances in digital image processing one could argue a cross section of a tree trunk is a "machine readable dataset"

dobby looms are an automated version of draw looms. Some use a draw boy, small child in the loom itself to draw up the warps as required for the patter. Later shortened to dobby.

Speaking as an artist and a programmer, has it ever struck you how utterly low it is to sit in a room making things? You are interacting with little speck of dead stuff. Staring, unmoving, practically dead yourself. Playing with a little dream. There's something deeply wrong with that. Spiritually wrong even. Sometimes I reflect and feel shame at my wastefulness.

"Gaze not into the abyss, lest you become recognized as an abyss domain expert, and they expect you keep gazing into the damn thing." —@[email protected]

Dead stuff is stuff without structure. I tend to think about my interactions with the universe as extending the structure that is me to dead stuff. Stuff is lifted to structuredness, and becomes part of us as a whole. I don't feel that's low at all.

Low and high are but you imposing your value system onto something that exists irrespective of it. "Low" could very well be the activity of breathing if one argues enough to show it. In reality actions don't and shouldn't exist to serve a higher purpose. Attachment with result is the cause of suffering. Attach yourself to the action.