Incoming links: Gold
A useless piece of paper (or digital version of it) that you can pay taxes with :)
As opposed to:
- 2020 cryptocurrencies, while governments still don't accept them for taxes, as well as other assets that are also not accepted for taxes (i.e. most assets)
- physical currencies that have intrinsic material value, e.g. gold coins
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.
A briefing on semiconductors by Fairchild Semiconductor (1967)
Source. Uploaded by the Computer History Museum. There is value in tutorials written by early pioneers of the field, this is pure gold.
Shows:
- photomasks
- silicon ingots and wafer processing
If you adda bit of impurities to certain materials, at low temperatures of a few Kelvin their resistivity actually starts increasing if you go below a certain critical temperature.
Kondo effect graph for gold with added impurities
. Source. 