Serious Fun
A look back over 2022 and some announcements
Happy New Year to everyone! I hope that 2023 is healthy, safe and prosperous for all readers of The Chip Letter.
When I started this newsletter I was uncertain to see how things would go. Would anyone be interested? How much writing would I be able to manage? What writing would work with readers and what wouldn’t.
After four months and thirty eight posts I’m delighted to report that
has over 1,800 subscribers.I’m really grateful to everyone who has subscribed, shared, liked or commented on my posts. Thank you everyone.
I’m particularly grateful to all who have made recommendations of The Chip Letter, and especially
at SemiAnalysis and at . Their publications are both fantastic and worthy of your support.In the last four months we’ve covered a lot of ground: Bob Noyce’s risk taking in the early years of Intel, the first RISC Processor, Faraday and Babbage meeting in London, IBM’s mainframe in a PC, Chip Wars, RISC-V, the early days of ASML and lots more.
Phew! This is just the beginning though …
Not Really A Retro-Computing Newsletter
Before going further I want to make a confession. I’m not really into retro-computing.
Now this might seem a little odd for someone who writes a newsletter about the history of computing. Let me explain.
I don’t really hanker to type on a TRS-80 or to poke at a PDP-11. Rather, I enjoy exploring the ideas behind historic designs and made them successful or otherwise, from both the perspective of their technology and as businesses.
To paraphrase David Byrne, I think it’s valuable to explore how we got here.
There is richness in the history of computing technology. Ideas that have been examined and tried before can be revisited, updated or combined with novel techniques to gain a new life.
In the first few editions of this newsletter we’ve covered lots of other examples of technologies that have made a come back in one form or another: RISC, wafer scale computing, techniques from the world of mainframes being used in Amazon’s data centres and so on.
And much of the technology and the tools that we use today have a surprisingly long timespan. Instruction Set Architectures’s can last for decades, as can programming languages. Moore’s law has underpinned and has guided much of technology development for the last half century.
Studying the history of computing means that we can better understand these long term features and trends.
And finally lots of the lessons from this history that are still relevant today. We can see strategies that worked and those that failed. How some firms grabbed the opportunities that the technology offered, and how some missed out.
So my ambition is both to cover historical computing in a fun and accessible way but also to help readers to understand the richness of our computing heritage and particularly those aspects that still have relevance today.
New Posts and Going Paid
So I want ‘The Chip Letter’ in 2023 to be bigger, better and more useful.
From now on I’ll be aiming to produce at least two ‘Chip Letter Links’ posts per month and two longer form narrative history / analysis posts each month. The longer form posts will be accompanied by supplemental posts looking in more detail at the technology and the background to the story.
To accompany this The Chip Letter will be going paid. The new supplemental posts will be for paid subscribers only. Other posts will generally remain free, but links posts will have some additional material for paid subscribers only.
I definitely want to keep the majority of ‘The Chip Letter’ free and open and I hope this strikes a reasonable balance.
Membership will be $7 per month or $70 per year. As a special launch offer yearly subscriptions will be available for $40 until the end of January.
The first post with a paid-for supplement will be sent to subscribers next weekend, but as a special New Year treat it’s available to paid subscribers now.
It’s ‘Captain Zilog Crushed! The Story of the Z8000’. The main post is available here and the supplemental post here. It tells the story of how Zilog’s entry into the 16-bit microprocessor market and how and why they lost to Intel, who then went on to dominate the desktop for over 40 years.
If you use an Intel based machine today then it helps explain ‘how we got here’.
And there is more! Coming up early in 2023 we have: the second part of the story of the founding of ASML; benchmarking systems of the 1980s; plus lots and lots more including regular ‘links’ posts.
I also have some additional benefits planned for paying subscribers. Watch this space for more news!
I hope you’re able to support with a paid subscription but in any event thanks so much for your continuing support.
2022 Highlights
It might be a little early to do a year in review but here are my highlights from the first four months.
Most Viewed Post: The Mainframe In Your Pocket
This post looked at how modern computers share a lot with historic mainframes and this led to a vigorous debate on Hacker News.
Post Generating the Most Subscribers: Chip Letter Links No. 9
There is a story behind this post. I submitted this to Hacker News expecting that a few people would see it on the ‘new’ page. About two hours later my phone started to send me alerts for new sign-ups every two minutes or so. I was initially puzzled until I saw it on the HN front page.
It soon disappeared though and I had a polite message from ‘dang’ telling me that posts with lots of links are discouraged. Fair enough! It was heartening to see so much interest though.
My Favourite Post: 65 Reasons to Celebrate the 6502
This post was lots of fun to write!
So that’s it for now. Thanks so much for subscribing.