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 grew up in the early years of personal computers and was a young adult in the early years of the web/internet, with most of my career in the age of mobile phones and wireless connectivity. I’ve never had to run a company without having a computer-based spreadsheet for computations. I remember adding machines with paper tapes, but never owned one. And until this week had never seen and NCR...

While reading about nostalgic computing on the Chip Letter, I came across the following picture of hand-written assembly code for the IBM S/360. What caught my eye wasn’t the paper spreadsheet, but the ah ha moment of clarity explaining why assemblers assume anything in the first column of text is a label, i.e. why assemblers require mnemonics to be prefixed by a space or tab. I’m an...

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...