Author here if anyone has questions...
replies(3):
I have a Displate of a 555 in my little maker corner someone gifted me once: https://eikehein.com/assets/images/makercorner.jpg
His response still resonates with me today: a military grade 555 would work in extreme conditions (e.g. heat), would last pretty much forever, would consume virtually no power, and will still cost you a penny.
Sometimes that's exactly what you need. Reliability, durability and cost trumps the power of programmability.
[1] https://www.righto.com/2024/08/pentium-navajo-fairchild-ship...
Really it's such a useful almost universal lego block of a component that it's hard to imagine it going away anytime soon. Sure microcontrollers are as cheap as chips these days, but you get a lot more with them. Do I need to say that sometimes more is less? Can think of scenarios where you absolutely don't want to see a chip containing firmware/code which needs auditing and locking down.
And every EE student back when we tied onions to our belts must have had a lab assignment to spec out a PLL using 555 and bits and bobs and then measure transient responses, temperature stability, etc.
Likely 1985.
https://www.crystalfontz.com/blog/look-back-tech-history-hd4...
It's also referenced in this catalog from 1982: https://bitsavers.org/components/hitachi/_dataBooks/1982_Hit...
Likely the first year of manufacture was 1981/82.
Similarly, Margo Selby crafted a very large, vibrant 16m textile installation titled ‘moon landing’ based on the work of Navajo women who wove the integrated computer circuits and memory cores that enabled the 1969 moon landing. Until recently it was on display at Canterbury Cathedral. It is accompanied by a musical composition for strings by Helen Caddick.
Children were stolen, forbidden from learning their native language, killed en masse, food supplies were destroyed, land was continuously taken from them the second anything valuable was discovered on it, etc. etc.
It's really horrific stuff and the effects are still extremely clear on the reservations today.
Core rope is different from core memory and much rarer. Core rope is essentially ROM, using much larger cores with wires going through or around a core, storing 192 bits per core. Core ropes were hand-woven (with machine guidance) for the Apollo Guidance Computer.
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/american-indi...
A modern CMOS microcontroller has a much more limited lifetime. Depending on model, you can hope for 10 years or 20 years, but not much more than that because very small MOS transistors and flash memory cells eventually die, unlike the more robust bipolar ICs (whose active regions are buried in the semiconductor crystal, not located at its surface, like in MOS devices).
Funny how, guided by pure mechanical necessity, pretty stuff can arise.
I've always thought that clockwork, chips and other machines were pretty.
And fractals. ( https://fleen.org/i40.png ) And plants and animals too. And weathered rock.
Which leads me to consider what isn't pretty. Naivety?
