81–90 of 105 posts
It feels like businesses today are better at pivoting. Imagine improving the state of the art by 10X and simply shelving it.
I went looking for a recent estimate of the number of transistors that have been manufactured. It appears to be in the range of 10^23. I'm pretty sure there in nothing else anyone has invented that has been replicated in such volume.
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If transistors would not be possible, then lots of other stuff would not exist, like solar panels or digital cameras. Handy electricity conversion, etc. I think alternativly we would have miniaturized vacuum tubes much more, the ones that powered computers before transistors (and made them huge) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum-tube_computer
Surprising to me - size reduced vacuum tubes happened and it's still being worked on in as I understand it. There are some quite miniature working vacuum tubes - if you search you'll find more information.
I went looking for a recent estimate of the number of transistors that have been manufactured. It appears to be in the range of 10^23. I'm pretty sure there in nothing else anyone has invented that has been replicated in such volume.
Wow, nearly a mole. I remember thinking that a mole of any "thing" was impossible.
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Letters?
Paperclips?
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=volume+of+a+paperclip+t...
[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=total+volume+of+oceans
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I'll be the first to admit this is a meaningless debate but seems fun! I'll say no We don't colloquial think of a HDD bit as a manufactured unit on magnetic disks. It doesn't have a direct macro connection/object. For SSDs the macro analog of a bit storage is a register and those are like 6 nand gates which those are made of like 3 transistors? Exact numbers are wrong I'm sure. It's been a long time.
I'm not so sure. Last time I followed the field, modern HDDs were nanostructured, such that each magnetic domain was literally a physically distinguishable object, in a sense. I'm not sure if that's still the case, and I'm also not 100% sure that ever made it in to production, but I'm pretty sure it did.
I went looking for a recent estimate of the number of transistors that have been manufactured. It appears to be in the range of 10^23. I'm pretty sure there in nothing else anyone has invented that has been replicated in such volume.
Penicillin molecules
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Interesting. Do you have a source? How does it compare to other tech, like nails? Or cups? Shoes?
Be careful with large numbers: 10^23 shoes would be roughly 854B shoes for every (~117B) human that have ever lived, that is about 14 million pairs of shoes per individual and per day. I am pretty sure there has never been a market for that many shoes.