Tagged history of technology · show all articles
Morris Chang founded TSMC on a bet the rest of the industry considered dubious: a chipmaker that designs nothing of its own. It became the single structural precondition for the fabless industry this cohort spends most of its pages covering.
"Foundry" gets used constantly in AI hardware coverage without ever being explained. The concept it names is simpler than it sounds, and its history explains almost everything else in this cohort's foundry briefings.
Jack Kilby built the first working integrated circuit in 1958. Robert Noyce invented the process that let one actually be mass-produced a year later. Popular history usually credits only one of them, and often the wrong one for the wrong reason.
Nearly every company in this cohort's history traces back to one 1957 resignation. Eight scientists walked out on their own boss and founded Fairchild Semiconductor — arguably the single most consequential exit in the industry's history.
The US won the protection it asked for. American DRAM makers never came back. What actually happened next is a stranger, more interesting story than "protectionism failed."
Gordon Moore observed a trend in 1965. The industry spent the next sixty years treating that observation as a target to hit rather than a fact to discover — which is the real reason it held for so long.
By 1986, Japan held roughly 75% of the global DRAM market. By the late 1990s, that lead belonged to Korea, and by the 2000s, Taiwan's foundry model had reshaped the whole industry around it. This briefing covers why, not just when.
Nvidia showed off CUDA in 2006. It cost billions, served a market that didn't yet exist, and didn't turn a profit for roughly a decade. This is the story of the software decision that quietly became AI hardware's entire foundation.
Why work was gathered under one roof remains genuinely disputed. Line shafts, clocks, gauges and time study each moved a decision somewhere new, and that relocation of control is the more durable story.
Writing appears first as an accounting technology, and everything after it — carriers, copying, printing, pagination, archives — is an argument about how a record earns the right to be believed without its author standing beside it.