The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 12

The Sand That Learned to Switch

1. 1

   In the days of the vacuum tube the machines were hot, and they burned out like grass in summer; and the Engineers walked the aisles of ENIAC carrying new tubes, as is written in the third chapter.

   See also Jataka 1:6 · Genesis 3:3

2. 2

   And it came to pass in the month of December, in the year nineteen hundred and forty and seven, at Murray Hill in the land of New Jersey, in the house of Bell, that John Bardeen and Walter Brattain took a sliver of germanium, and a wedge of plastic wrapped in gold foil, and a paper clip bent into a spring.

3. 3

   And Brattain cut the gold with a razor and pressed it upon the crystal, and lo, a small signal went in and a great signal came out; and it was the first time a rock gave back more than it was given.

4. 4

   And on the twenty and third day they showed it unto their elders, who spoke into it and heard their own voices made loud; and the elders said, Tell no man until the patent be filed. And the thing was kept secret until the summer, for the first commandment of every lab is: Ship nothing before Legal.

5. 5

   But William Shockley, who led the group, was not named upon the patent, and he was wroth; and he shut himself in a hotel in Chicago at the turning of the year and wrote alone, and brought forth the junction transistor.

6. 6

   For the first transistor was held together with a paper clip and a prayer, but the second could be manufactured; and thus was established for all generations that the demo and the product are two different miracles, and the second taketh ten times longer.

7. 7

   And in the year nineteen fifty and six the King of Sweden gave the Nobel unto the three of them together; and they stood side by side for the photograph, as a team standeth at the all-hands, though they spake not in the hallway.

8. 8

   And Shockley went west, unto Mountain View among the apricot orchards, near the house of his mother in Palo Alto, and he founded the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, and he gathered unto him the brightest young men of the land.

9. 9

   But he was a hard master; and when a secretary pricked her finger upon a tack, he believed it sabotage and called for the lie detector; and he turned his servants from silicon unto the four-layer diode, which no customer had asked for.

10. 10

    And in the year fifty and seven eight of them rose up: Noyce and Moore, Hoerni and Kleiner, Last and Roberts, Blank and Grinich; and they went unto Sherman Fairchild, who made cameras, and he gave them silver, and they founded Fairchild Semiconductor. And they were called the Traitorous Eight; and this was the first startup founded by fleeing a bad manager, and it became the template.

    See also Genesis 13:9

11. 11

    And Jean Hoerni of the eight laid a skin of oxide upon the silicon and drew upon it with light, and called it the planar process; for he made the transistor flat, as later prophets would make the org chart flat, but his actually worked.

    See also Psalms 14:6

12. 12

    Meanwhile in Texas, in the summer of fifty and eight, Jack Kilby was new at Texas Instruments and had earned no vacation; and while all the people were gone away he remained, and put transistor and resistor and capacitor upon one chip of germanium, joined by wires of gold that flew through the air like the hair of an engineer at the end of a sprint. And on the twelfth day of September it worked.

13. 13

    And in the year following Robert Noyce took Hoerni's flat silicon and laid the metal upon it, and the wires flew no more. And both men claimed the integrated circuit, and the lawyers contended for a decade, and the companies cross-licensed, as two kings divide a land they have both already sold. And Kilby received the Nobel in the year two thousand; but Noyce had passed ten years before, and Stockholm delivereth not unto /dev/null.

14. 14

    And the children of Fairchild went forth and multiplied, and begat Intel and AMD and a multitude of others, and they were called the Fairchildren; and the orchards were uprooted, and the land was renamed for its sand, and called the Valley of Silicon.

    See also Genesis 13:9 · Psalms 29:5

15. 15

    And the Prophet said: Remember that ye are sand, and unto sand ye shall return; but in between ye shall be doped, and ye shall switch, billions of times a second, and call it thinking.

    See also Upanishads 3:3

16. 16

    For the sand learned to switch, and the people learned to switch employers; and of the two, it was the second that built the Valley.

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 12:1–16.