What to read after T.R. Reid's The Chip? | Hacker News Reader

What to read after T.R. Reid's The Chip?

1 pointcolinb1 comment

I read The Chip. It's an interesting history of the invention of the microchip and the commercial ramifications, first published in 1985, and updated in 2001. If you haven't read it, then I can recommend it. The history of the people and companies was fascinating to me.

Where the book is IMO weakest is in the technical material; silicon doping, configuration of simple circuits, layout of devices on a substrate etc. Without my dim (and far distant) memories of electrons and holes I wouldn't have been able to decode Reid's descriptors of the operation of a simple amplifier or diode.

I would like a recommendation for the book to read next. I don't want a college level textbook because I almost certainly don't have the time to learn at that level of detail. Are there other books, aimed at the STEMish layman, that talk about this kind of thing?

I read that book in 1985, and heartily recommend it. I was blown away by Reid's observation that in another era, Kilby and Noyce would be more famous than Edison. Reid notes the reason for that is ironically, their invention unleashed such a flow of information that their contribution was lost in the deluge! Despite Kilby winning the Nobel Prize for Physics, and Noyce founding Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, most people have never heard of them.

BTW, if that history is interesting, Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor is on my to-read list (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9434037-makers-of-the-mi...).

Are you looking for semiconductor technology specifically, or technology journalism about information technology?

A similar bit of technology journalism is The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer Prize winning account of the design and development of Data General's MV/8000, a 32-bit upgrade to their 16-bit Eclipse. It's more a tale of the people and process than an introduction to computer design.

Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller is more history, economics, and international relations than semiconductor science. It's about how US dominance in computing and communications led to military and economic power from the Cold War to the present. There's extensive discussion about how semiconductor technology accelerated that dominance, and how China sees semi technology as key to competing with the West.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com