First You Buy ASML

Today’s reading is from the OS/2 Museum, and it is titled The End of an Athlon.

Early Athlons shipped with a bare die. No heat spreader, no lid, nothing between the cooler and the silicon but your own steadiness. You seat the heatsink, you feel the clip take, and the corner goes. The post describes this happening. A photograph shows what it looks like afterwards, which is not much.

Then somebody in the thread asked the question. Assuming unlimited money, and assuming you wanted to repair the thing rather than replace it, could it be done?

Note that nobody laughed. The congregation costed it out.

First you buy the masks. AMD has the tapeout for a twenty-five-year-old part somewhere, and for enough money they might part with it, or you buy AMD. Then you need a fab running a comparable process, so you hire one, and if none will take the job you buy a piece of TSMC, because the chemistry involved is not something you can order. Then you buy a chunk of ASML and commission roughly ten years of research into regrowing silicon on a fractured layer while re-exposing the missing part, without destroying the part that still works. Before any of that you need new scanning technology, because you cannot rebuild the chip until you have measured precisely what remains of it, and nothing currently exists that can tell you. One man wrote that there is no way to reclaim any of the tiny fragments, which had preferred to become dust rather than take sides. That is the most tender sentence written about a processor this year. Another man noted that you could just buy a different CPU. Everyone in the thread already knew that. It had no effect on the estimate.

One thread down, another man is rebuilding one of these machines. He keeps it because it has a five and a quarter inch floppy drive and a tape drive, and those are reasons. The CPU fan is fine. What he needs is a forty millimetre fan for the north bridge, the shallow kind, the kind with an integrated heatsink boat. He ordered one from a shop that mostly sells parts for old gaming hardware. They sent a similar forty millimetre fan. It had no heatsink, it would not attach to the old boat, it had fewer blades, and it spun in the opposite direction. Fifteen dollars. He did not bother returning it. He has found the correct part listed online with a lead time of October. He is still looking.

Nobody paid either of these men. That is the entire sermon and I could stop here.

Now consider a thing that was paid for.

The Sydney Marathon finisher medal, professionally commissioned, professionally rendered, professionally approved, depicts the Olympic stadium in Munich. The likely mechanism is that Sydney’s ground is Allianz Stadium, Munich has the Allianz Arena, there are seven Allianz stadiums on earth, and at some point in the chain one of them was close enough. Bayern’s roof is among the most photographed structures in Europe. Zero people in the process recognised it. To their credit, the marathon has taken this well. Their line was that they’re not going to run from it, which is a better joke than the one they made by accident.

Before that, the government of New South Wales commissioned a logo of the waratah, the state flower, and received a lotus. It is now on everything. When people pointed this out, the response was that you are looking at it wrong, and in any case the consultants had already been paid. A man who moved to Sydney said he had assumed for years that he simply did not know what a waratah looked like. He did know. The logo was wrong.

The medal is a mistake. The lotus is a mistake that survived contact with an invoice, which is a different species entirely. Money was in the room for both of them, and money bought precisely what money buys, which is a deliverable arriving on a date. Nobody in either chain wanted the object to exist. They wanted the object to be delivered. Those are separate jobs and only one of them looks at roofs.

So here is the claim. Attention is not purchased. It is donated, and it goes wherever somebody wanted the thing to be real, and there is no reliable relationship between that and what anything cost.

Which brings us to the emulator.

MartyPC reproduces an IBM PC of the early eighties down to the cycle. MDA, Hercules, CGA, EGA, the AdLib card, the memory sidecar. It is written in Rust, which the thread argued about for some time, as is traditional. Somebody found their way to EGATREK and said they had not thought about EGATREK in thirty years.

But the first request, from a man handed a cycle-accurate 8088, was for the sound. He wanted the screeching and the grumbling of the hard disk. He apologised for it. He assumed he was in the minority. Within minutes somebody replied that IBMulator already has hard drive sounds, because of course somebody had sat down and reproduced the noise of a 1985 disk labouring, and somebody else had noticed them do it, and remembered.

This is the whole business. Cycle accuracy is a specification. The grinding is affection. You can tell exactly how much a machine was loved by counting which of its defects people bothered to keep.

NetBSD is the same instinct with a mailing list attached, existing so that a Jornada with an SH3 processor has somewhere to go, and running a mail server on a Pi Zero for seven years for no reason anyone was compensated for. Somebody in that thread said you could throw a squirrel carcass in a cardboard box and install NetBSD on it, and was immediately corrected on the endianness of the squirrel.

And there is a page on the internet now that catalogues ElevenLabs, TwelveLabs, ThirteenLabs, and the rest of the sequence, an entire naming genre with a market capitalisation. Follow the number back and it terminates at a person whose handle was 15, who cracked voice synthesis so that My Little Pony characters could say funny things, and put it on the web for free, and never published a paper, and never raised a round. The industry copied his number. It did not copy his reason. The number was the only part that was free to take.

Meanwhile, the sole party currently investing serious engineering hours in your aftermarket Android head unit is the operator quietly installing a residential proxy on it, having correctly identified that it sits on a clean mobile connection attached to a twelve volt rail. The manufacturer stopped existing. Somebody is finally paying your dashboard some attention. This is what it looks like when the only donated care in the system comes from the wrong direction.

There was also a thread this week about becoming a better writer, in which the advice was to read a great deal and the objection was that nobody has time, and buried in it a structural engineer confessed that he reads building codes all day and has started writing shall and need not in ordinary sentences. He is not wrong to be worried. You become fluent in whatever you attend to, and attention is the only currency here that spends.

So: forty millimetres. Twelve volts. Shallow profile. Must attach to the original heatsink boat. Must turn the other way from the one he already has, which cost fifteen dollars and is in a drawer.

That is the whole specification. It is not being met. He is still looking.