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Amorymeltzertoday at 10:36 AM1 replyview on HN

It's been mentioned before, but Chris Miller's Chip War from a few years back is an excellent, very-readable book on the topic. Goes into depth on the history and development of chips and their production. He did the rounds on the interviews back then, and it's definitely worth a read. The EUV stuff is great, but I particularly liked his history on how the USSR was always going to lose and how integral Apollo really was.


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kenstoday at 1:58 PM

Chip War is an interesting book, but it has a lot of errors, which made it frustrating to read. For instance, it said that vacuum tube computers were hardly usable because they attracted moths, so they required constant debugging and were only used in specialized applications like cryptography. This is wrong in many ways. Most notably, Grace Hopper's story of the moth was in the Harvard Mark II computer, a relay computer. (I saw the actual moth yesterday, by the way.) Vacuum tube computers were highly popular, selling in the thousands for numerous general-purpose applications. And contrary to Chip War, ENIAC was not used to compute artillery tables during WWII, because it wasn't running until the war ended. This was just a half-page section in the book, but it messed up a lot of things.