There's almost too much volume these days. There's dedicated websites/apps/podcasts for Apple, Android, PC gaming, Xbox gaming, PS4 gaming, Switch gaming, etc. Product Hunt was a hot thing for a while and is still running. In terms of more general coverage, The Verge, Engadget, Lifehacker, Wired, and NYT Wirecutter are still good among many many others.
There was a good run of Computer Chronicles, TechTV, and G4 for a while there. These days, This Week in Tech still exists in podcast form. G4 had a short revival as G4TV a few years back. There's nothing nearly as popular these days, but there's still lots of good ones like Waveform, SomeGadgetGuy, and AwesomeCast.
There is very little with a) high technical quality in the presented content, b) an assumption that the average viewer is reasonably intelligent, and c) high production quality.
The Computer Chronicles was kind of unique that way.
Edit: OTOH I just saw a 55 minute well-produced youtube video on ASML's EUV photolithography machine that fulfilled all of that. I had some bias against this channel for some reason I don't remember, but anyway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0.
Veritassium is in a league of its own. Just take a look at their last year's videos. The production value is just second to none.
They have enough of a following now that they can dedicate 55 minutes to something and not worry about the algorithm, which usually dictates much shorter form factors
This was the first of their videos that impressed me. Looking back, I have watched a few of their videos per year. Previous were videos tended have much less content density and quality.
I really enjoyed the segments where they let ASML's (now former) CTO Martin van den Brink just talk.
Henessey and Patterson "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" has 6 published editions (1990, 1996?, 2003, 2006, 2011, 2019) with the 7th due November 2025. Each edition would have a varying set of CPUs as examples for each chapter. For example, the various chapters in the 2nd edition has sections on the MIPS R4000 and the PowerPC 620, while the 3rd edition has sections on the Trimedia TM32, Intel P6, Intel IA-64, Alpha 21264, Sony PS2 Emotion Engine, Sun Wildfire, MIPS R4000, and MIPS R4300. From what I could figure out via web searches, the 6th edition has RISC-V in the appendix, but the 3rd through 5th editions has the MIPS R4000.
Patterson and Hennessy "Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface" has had 6 editions (1998, 2003, 2005, 2012, 2014, 2020) but various editions have had ARM, MIPS, and RISC-V specific editions.
TSMC's estimated costs in 2020, were $12 billion for their first fab. In 2025, their updated estimates were $65 billion for the first three fabs and $165 billion for when they get to six such facilities. So, $8.9B is a lot of money, but isn't anywhere close to getting to the equivalent to what TSMC has in Taiwan.
> getting to the equivalent to what TSMC has in Taiwan
That wasn't the question. The question, at least for me, is can you build non-zero chip production, enough to start building out a sustainable business. Obviously you're not going to compete with TSMC on day one, but there's a wide spectrum between that and "garage".
How would you build a sustainable business based on old processes though? The only reason fabs exist that use old processes is because they were once new processes, and once they've been built you may as well keep them running for a while. Building a new 50 nm fab would never be viable.
Those old fabs are still able to be useful at all because most applications don't need cutting edge chips. Chips have been Good Enough for decades. And again, if the goal actually is manufacturing independence, buying local chips that are a bit more expensive is totally worth it.
The Windows 9x series (and earlier) were tightly coupled with x86 (and DOS).
The Windows NT family of operating systems has always had the "Hardware Abstraction Layer" (aka HAL) which helped with porting the operating system to other architectures.
I don't expect any single article to cover all the details of a company that just passed it's 30th year. And even then, they're missing bits of lore, like the CEO playing ping pong as a teenager (see https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/jen-hsun-huang-nvidia-...).
This WIRED article from 2002 gives an interesting snapshot of the same company and CEO:
Meet Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, the man who plans to make the CPU obsolete.
https://www.wired.com/2002/07/nvidia/
- Quote: "What we can do in the next five years is going to blow your mind. In 10 years, we should be bigger than Intel." (which took until July 2020)
Then you can see how things evolved by the 2009/2010 timeframe, plus where they thought they might be headed:
Mercury News interview: Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder of Nvidia
https://www.mercurynews.com/2009/10/09/mercury-news-interview-jen-hsun-huang-co-founder-of-nvidia/
I’m Prepared for Adversity. I Waited Tables.
https://archive.is/2iUbf
Even prior to those guys, Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain have the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work. Kilby received the same in 2000 (Noyce passed away in 1990).
I think it's important to note that much (all?) of PARCs research has been oriented around the "office of the future". In the broadest sense of that vision, they had a huge hand in originating a lot of computing technologies.
And while SRI has had their impact in the computing industry, they also have other research labs that have very little to do with computing such as biomedical, education, and policy.
sri was never gonna allow a bunch of hippies and bearded longhairs tour their facility in the spirit of academic comradeship. (IE no microsoft, no apple being allowed to walk around and talk to people in the 80s to get the ideas for Macintosh and Windows)
Ironically, Apple and Microsoft would never allow some stranger company to walk into their offices and see everything they were developing either. lol
By the time apple was founded, many (most) of the people doing research that would be of interest to Jobs had already moved over to PARC. Larry Tesler springs immediately to mind, but Thierry Bardini's book on Engelbart has a more complete list. After the ARC fell apart in 1970, PARC was launching and was a natural place for them to land.
Xerox had two meetings with Apple, in December 1979. Neither they nor Microsoft was ever able to "walk into their offices and see everything they were developing ."
"PARC was not at all secretive about its work. Its researchers published widely, and there was a regular flow of traffic between PARC and Stanford's computer science community. "
as opposed to a military intelligence company where all that would get you fired if not in prison.
I can't recall the female scientist's name, but I am certain have read an 'oral history' where this specific person, present when Apple people show up, angrily calls up Xerox HQ in east coast to protest and was told, over the phone, to "show them everything".
This one is different from the other source I recall. It could have been someone else's oral history and she was mentioned. This is what she says in her own OH:
"When Stewart Brand came into PARC and there was a book Cybernetics 2? [II cybernetic frontiers], half of it was about the "secret" company and Stewart had pictures of PARC and so there had been publicity that I guess hadn’t been properly signed off on. And so there had been a bit of a “You don’t get to publish for awhile” period. I think Alan took it too seriously. He didn’t like having his hand slapped. We did start publishing again more in the ’76 timeframe including the personal dynamic media paper that Alan and I did for IEEE Computer Software. I wanted to go to corporate and ask for permission and it was a little risky because you didn’t know what would come back. There’s no reason for them to say yes.
Lucky for me, between the time I suggested it and actually asking, Xerox’s venture group had bought a lot of equity in a little fledgling computer company that wasn’t doing very well called Apple Computer and they had arranged for the Apple executives and then later the Lisa programming team, to come for a visit.
I kind of parlayed that into, “Well you’re willing to give it away. You’re not interested.” And I wrote this motivator about why we should be able to publish it all because we were planning to write a book and we were planning to have this community implementation event. I think it went to one of the principals at the venture group who then asked Jeff Rulifson his opinion. Jeff was on some special leave from PARC to corporate and he wrote “Oh sure, publish all this”. So I had it [the permission] on paper."
-- end --
I don't recall hearing about this Xerox venture group and its "lot of equity" in Apple. But ..
"Xerox had had an active CVC program since the 1960s, operating an internally managed fund that invested in some of the most legendary figures in Silicon Valley, including Raymond Kurzweil and Steve Jobs. Kurzweil got his start in technology when Xerox invested in his first company, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence Inc., in 1982, to develop a computer that could transcribe spoken English. The idea behind the investment was to create technology that would increase demand for Xerox’s printing products when it ultimately hit the market.
When Apple released its revolutionary Macintosh computer, some observers claimed that it had commercialized technologies first developed at Xerox PARC, such as the mouse, windows, and icons, even dating the origin of the supposed copying to a 1979 visit to the lab by Jobs and other Apple employees — the tour is considered a seminal event in Silicon Valley lore. Although the accusation that Apple outright copied its ideas for user interface from Xerox is generally refuted today, the revelations stung Xerox’s management. The company was eventually spurred into rethinking its CVC program in an effort to better capitalize on the company’s languishing in-house technologies."
Xerox was paid for the crown jewels and according to Larry Tesler, it didn't take any arm-twisting to get him to move to Apple as Xerox was dragging their feet commercializing PARC's innovations.
Xerox received Apple stock for those meetings which they sold in the IPO. I’ve never seen anyone do a calculation of the present value of that stock but it’s probably a significant fraction of Xerox’s market cap today.
Nice post there. There's definitely a lot of 20/20 hindsight that people apply to PARC's history with respect to computing.
It's clear that just the investments that Xerox did have would have been huge had they just held on to them. That's ignoring what they could have done had cashed out less conservatively and reinvested in ongoing technology concerns the same way that Intel Capital or Google Ventures has.
Beyond that, it would have been beyond epic for Xerox to have had all the right pieces to replace a huge chunk of the high tech ecosystem by itself. Each of the successes that "should have belonged to PARC" involves VCs, hundreds or thousands of employees, business pivots, decades of existence, and plain luck and timing.
Hank Chesborough's (formerly of Harvard Business School, at Berkeley Haas School of Business last I checked) lists 35 companies that spun out of Xerox in "The Governance and Performance of Xerox's Technology Spin-Off Companies". Just that level of brain drain/distraction was bad enough at times for PARC's ongoing work.
There was a good run of Computer Chronicles, TechTV, and G4 for a while there. These days, This Week in Tech still exists in podcast form. G4 had a short revival as G4TV a few years back. There's nothing nearly as popular these days, but there's still lots of good ones like Waveform, SomeGadgetGuy, and AwesomeCast.
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