Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

It is quite amazing to read through books such as The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray by Charles J. Murray (1997), as it makes you notice that earlier CPUs (all before the 70's) were not made with integrated circuits, but rather smaller pieces glued up on PCBs! E.g. the arithmetic logic unit was actually a discrete component at one point.

The reason for this can also be understood quite clearly by reading books such as Robert Noyce: The Man Behind the Microchip by Leslie Berlin (2006). The first integrated circuits were just too small for this. It was initially unimaginable that a CPU would fit in a single chip! Even just having a very small number of components on a chip was already revolutionary and enough to kick-start the industry. Just imagine how much money any level of integration saved in those early days for production, e.g. as opposed to manually soldering point-to-point constructions. Also the reliability, size an weight gains were amazing. In particular for military and spacial applications originally.

2023: You can't apparently fire someone in academia!

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Many/most microcontroller boards have analog-to-digital converters built into them, it is very convenient. E.g. it is the case for the Raspberry Pi Pico.

Examples under python.

Ciro Santilli's wife was studying a bit of basic Python for some job interviews, when she noticed:Damn right, girl, damn right.

Ciro remembers hearing about Python online briefly. It seemed like a distant thing from the Java/C dominated (and outdated) university courses. Then some teaching assistant mentioned during some course when Ciro was at École Polytechnique that Python was a great integration tool. That sounded cool.

Then finally, when the École Polytechnique mathematics department didn't let Ciro Santilli do his internship of choice due to grades and Ciro was at an useless last moment backup internship, he learned more Python instead of doing his internship job, and was hooked.

Available for free online rent on the Internet Archive: archive.org/details/qedmenwhomadeitd0000schw

This book has formulas on it, which is quite cool!! And the formulas are basically not understandable unless you know the subject pretty well already in advance. It is however possible to skip over them and get back to the little personal stories.