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The Pentium as a Navajo Weaving
- 1bent 2y agoThis 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.
- ahazred8ta 2y agoDoo ahashyaa da.
- kens 2y agoAuthor here for your obscure Pentium questions...
- hindsightbias 2y agoWell done.
- kens 2y agoThanks! Curiously, the article doesn't show up on HN. Maybe my domain got banned or something?
- Joe_Cool 2y agoI just saw it on the frontpage and very much enjoyed it.
- throwaway290 2y agoCheck if you accidentally clicked "hide"... (hidden posts in your profile)
- teruakohatu 2y agoThat was a very interesting and well researched article. Thank you.
- omoikane 2y agoI 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?
- kens 2y agoThe 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.)
- Tuna-Fish 2y agoNote 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.
- kens 2y agoUnfortunately it's not that easy. I was working with John McMaster to get backside die shots of the 386 using infrared but it didn't work out.
- OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago"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"
- n8henrie 2y agoJust moved back to ABQ from Shiprock last month, after 8 years. Not every day you see Shiprock featured in an HN post!
- benatkin 2y agoNot every day I see a place on the Colorado Plateau in an HN post! I live in the SF Bay Area but am from Flagstaff!
- chiph 2y agoI 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?
- h2odragon 2y agothere was tyan, supermicro, and MSI? at least i thin my board with the dual pentium 60mhz chips was msi.
- xanathar 2y agoPentium 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.
- TheAmazingRace 2y agoThat sounds correct to me. Also, the P5 was a 5V design! Intel went to 3.3V soon after the very first Pentium CPUs.
- gattilorenz 2y agoYou can find multiple of them here, with pictures too: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/?page=1&itemsPerPage=24&showImages=0&cpuSocket1=3&cpuSocket2=3 https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/?page=1&itemsPerPage=24...
- toast0 2y agoNot a pentium question, but.. > Due to the end of the Cold War, Hughes acquired General Dynamics' missile business in 1991 before being acquired by General Motors in 1985 and sold to Raytheon in 1997. I'm guessing that's supposed to be 91 -> 95 -> 97?
- kens 2y agoTrying 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 :-)
- MandieD 2y agoAs 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.
- __alexander 2y agoExcellent article. I know Shiprock but I didn’t know it’s history with manufacturing processors. Thank you for writing it.
- wolf550e 2y agoI 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?
- kens 2y agoI 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.
- klyrs 2y agoIt'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.
- h2odragon 2y agoFairly rare to be able to connect sheep with semiconductors. I wonder if anyone is working on ovine AI opportunities yet.
- NelsonMinar 2y agoThat story about Fairchild manufacturing at Shiprock is fascinating and heartbreaking. Glad to see it so thoughtfully researched and presented.
- tarellel 2y agoAnd 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.
- BoingBoomTschak 2y agoYou know what they've said for millennia: "Vae victis"!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- niccl 2y agoA fun full-circle. The Jacquard loom was influential for input for early computers, and now the computer is influencing the output of looms
- xiande04 2y agoI 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.
- kens 2y agoThat doesn't make sense, since computers were using punch cards before von Neumann got involved.
- xiande04 2y agoAh, 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!
- aoanla 2y agoNot 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!)
- swayvil 2y agoSpeaking 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.
- groestl 2y agoDead 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.
- turtledragonfly 2y agoHello, fellow artist+programmer (: What do you think of the quote: "Whatever you do will be utterly insignificant, but it is very important that you do it" ? Personally, I think playing with little dreams is beautiful, but I do hope you find something that satisfies your soul. In my experience, artistry and a bit of depression often go hand-in-hand. If you spend a lot of time paying attention to things, you're bound to notice the Abyss.
- ahazred8ta 2y ago"Gaze not into the abyss, lest you become recognized as an abyss domain expert, and they expect you keep gazing into the damn thing." —@nickm_tor@mastodon.lol
- robocat 2y agoSoeaking as an engineer, has it ever struck you how utterly low it is to sit in a room making art? Sculptural materials and paint is dead. Words are but faint echoes of human life. Your comments are more a reflection upon your own worldview. To improve things you merely need to change your own perceptions.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- renewiltord 2y agoAre there automatic looms the way there are CNC machines so that you can get a custom design on?
- Stratoscope 2y agoSince 1804! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine
- renewiltord 2y agoSo _that's_ what a Jacquard loom is. I've seen it mentioned often. Thank you.
- kragen 2y agodobbies automated looms before that
- OogieM 2y agodobby 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.
- ahazred8ta 2y agoThere are some old Jacquard card stacks which are literally the oldest machine readable datasets in existence, a century before Hollerith.
- cmiller1 2y agoThe 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"
- tithe 2y agoThat's some serious...multithreading! (I applaud others for resisting such cringe, but I just couldn't help myself.)
- koolba 2y agoThe entirety would have complete faster if they only used green threads.
- lelanthran 2y agoMaybe if they switched all code to Java, they can run it on a Loom?
- DaoVeles 2y agoDon't hold back, that level of puns is what I live for.
- tug2024 2y ago[dead]
- layer8 2y agoJust wait for the Pentium 4 with hyper-threading.
- leed25d 2y agoI always look askance at a blanket statement.
- drivers99 2y ago“The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.” – Ada Lovelace, 1843
- Flop7331 2y ago[flagged]
- ein0p 2y agoI’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.
- DaoVeles 2y agoThat is how I generally see it. The technological suite needed to get to that stage is astounding. It is a great indicator of progress and decline, like how the quality of crockery dropped in the roman empire showed how their economics hampered their skills. Maybe computing is one of the big hurdles that shows the overall capabilities of economies and on a much more broad scale, species. Like wrap drives in Star Trek.
- Taniwha 2y agoI'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
- bankcust08385 2y agoNeat. 2 RTL gates -> 16 CMOS transistors (10 for XOR and 6 for OR)
- Taniwha 2y agoActually I misspoke, it's a full adder and very similar to the one on page 5 here https://www.cerc.utexas.edu/~jaa/vlsi/lectures/8-1.pdf https://www.cerc.utexas.edu/~jaa/vlsi/lectures/8-1.pdf
- anthonix1 2y agoDon't bother with the rectilinear pakeha layouts, do your half adders in curvilinear patterns, Koru style
- Taniwha 2y agoI am pakeha and tangata triti .... now I have an idea for the next window (I was thinking about a neuron ...)
- LennyHenrysNuts 2y agoAbsolutely fascinating article. I wasn't aware of any of the Navajo history of Farichild Semiconductors. Thanks for sharing.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoWow. 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)
- tug2024 2y agoDo sha nada da da !
- mlsu 2y agoWow, what a gem of a post. I knew about the Navajo codebreakers but didn't ever hear about the Shiprock connection. I also am admiring how deftly the author was able to weave in (heh) little bits of low-level computer knowhow. This is an article I can send to my non-tech friends!
- datavirtue 2y agoThis 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.
- squarefoot 2y agoThis triggered a memory about the Native American code talkers employed by the US military during WWII to encode communications using their own languages which were unknown to the Axis forces. First thought: "ha! Now they're doing firmware?":) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_talker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_talker
- kens 2y agoInterestingly, Peter MacDonald, the Navajo tribal leader at the time, had been a code talker during World War II.
- elzbardico 2y agoI wonder how much debate and how many PhD dissertations in archeology will result when this rug in found in a excavation some 2000 years from now.