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Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago

(news.asu.edu)
273 points geox | 2 comments | 17 Jun 24 21:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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johnnylambada ◴[18 Jun 24 02:27 UTC] No.40713507[source]▶
It’s fascinating to think about the number of PUs (procedural units) it takes to make a modern tool. Something as simple as a modern hammer must number in the thousands and a mobile phone in the millions or billions.
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w-ll ◴[18 Jun 24 05:03 UTC] No.40714213[source]▶
Billions of transistors in a smart phone, and those took many^many machines to build
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fsckboy ◴[18 Jun 24 06:17 UTC] No.40714579[source]▶
the genius of photolithography (and its descendents) is that each chip is printed all at once, all the transistors at once over several steps for the several layers. This is what makes chips inexpensive.
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1. vasco ◴[18 Jun 24 07:37 UTC] No.40715073[source]▶
The genius of photolithography is many things, I wouldn't say the wafer process is any more special than the statistical models that can predict where a nozzle needs to point to lay substract with more precision than the nozzle itself can provide or a number of other important inventions there.
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2. fsckboy ◴[18 Jun 24 19:22 UTC] No.40721185[source]▶
using the same process that was used to make a single transistor (and package and attach connecting leads to it)...

...to make an entire circuit (and package and attach connecting leads to it)...

is the invention of the integrated circuit

and photolithography made that possible. It subsequently had a large number of important follow on innovations, but which were conceptually proper subsets of it.

had some other process made integrated circuits possible, that other process would have subsequently had many important innovations.

what flowed from photolithographic chip making is still flowing today.