Brand new, your retrospective chip
From The Nonist …
What we see pictured here, as I’m sure many of you already know, is the world’s first integrated circuit, created by Jack S. Kilby in the summer of 1958. That this creation, with its bubbled wax and carefully twined wire, is the work of human hands is unmistakable. The seemingly messy, cobbled-together, simplicity of it is heartening somehow when one compares it to the microchips of present day, which a human hand is not meant to touch and could only hope to damage with its meaty, imprecise groping. This is a technology which though reality-shaping has, in large part, been complexified right out of direct human contact.
Following this are sixteen other images taken from the book State of the Art: A Photographic History of the Integrated Circuit, by Stan Augarten published some twenty five years ago, I have to agree with the nonist that the aesthetic of some of the earlier chips are definatly more interesting than the later chips due to their simplicity, hard to believe some of these designs are almost fifty years old now.