Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

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按照章节发出原文，欢迎阅读及发表见解，评论区有朋友贴出来图书资源。

更新一下格式，之前换行符都没了，不方便阅读。
Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology —— chapter 1
[size=1.6em]From Steel to Silicon

Japanese soldiers described World War II as a “typhoon of steel.” It certainly felt that way to Akio Morita, a studious young engineer from a family of prosperous sake merchants. Morita only barely avoided the front lines by getting assigned to a Japanese navy engineering lab. But the typhoon of steel crashed through Morita’s homeland, too, as American B-29 Superfortress bombers pummeled Japan’s cities, destroying much of Tokyo and other urban centers. Adding to the devastation, an American blockade created widespread hunger and drove the country toward desperate measures. Morita’s brothers were being trained as kamikaze pilots when the war ended.

Across the East China Sea, Morris Chang’s childhood was punctuated by the sound of gunfire and air-raid sirens warning of imminent attack. Chang spent his teenage years fleeing the Japanese armies that swept across China, moving to Guangzhou; the British colony of Hong Kong; China’s wartime capital of Chongqing; and then back to Shanghai after the Japanese were defeated. Even then, the war didn’t really end, because Communist guerillas relaunched their struggle against the Chinese government. Soon Mao Zedong’s forces were marching on Shanghai. Morris Chang was once again a refugee, forced to flee to Hong Kong for the second time.

Budapest was on the opposite side of the world, but Andy Grove lived through the same typhoon of steel that swept across Asia. Andy (or Andras Grof, as he was then known) survived multiple invasions of Budapest. Hungary’s far-right government treated Jews like the Groves as second-class citizens, but when war broke out in Europe, his father was nevertheless drafted and sent to fight alongside Hungary’s Nazi allies against the Soviet Union, where he was reported missing in action at Stalingrad. Then, in 1944, the Nazis invaded Hungary, their ostensible ally, sending tank columns rolling through Budapest and announcing plans to ship Jews like Grove to industrial-scale death camps. Still a child, Grove heard the thud of artillery again months later as Red Army troops marched into Hungary’s capital, “liberating” the country, raping Grove’s mother, and installing a brutal puppet regime in the Nazis’ place.

Endless tank columns; waves of airplanes; thousands of tons of bombs dropped from the skies; convoys of ships delivering trucks, combat vehicles, petroleum products, locomotives, rail cars, artillery, ammunition, coal, and steel—World War II was a conflict of industrial attrition. The United States wanted it that way: an industrial war was a struggle America would win. In Washington, the economists at the War Production Board measured success in terms of copper and iron, rubber and oil, aluminum and tin as America converted manufacturing might into military power.

The United States built more tanks than all the Axis powers combined, more ships, more planes, and twice the Axis production of artillery and machine guns. Convoys of industrial goods streamed from American ports across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, supplying Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and other allies with key materiel. The war was waged by soldiers at Stalingrad and sailors at Midway. But the fighting power was produced by America’s Kaiser shipyards and the assembly lines at River Rouge.

In 1945, radio broadcasts across the world announced that the war was finally over. Outside of Tokyo, Akio Morita, the young engineer, donned his full uniform to hear Emperor Hirohito’s surrender address, though he listened to the speech alone rather than in the company of other naval officers, so he wouldn’t be pressured to commit ritual suicide. Across the East China Sea, Morris Chang celebrated the war’s end and Japan’s defeat with a prompt return to a leisurely teenaged life of tennis, movies, and card games with friends. In Hungary, Andy Grove and his mother slowly crept out of their bomb shelter, though they suffered as much during the Soviet occupation as during the war itself.

World War II’s outcome was determined by industrial output, but it was clear already that new technologies were transforming military power. The great powers had manufactured planes and tanks by the thousands, but they’d also built research labs that developed new devices like rockets and radars. The two atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought forth much speculation that a nascent Atomic Age might replace an era defined by coal and steel.

Morris Chang and Andy Grove were schoolboys in 1945, too young to have thought seriously about technology or politics. Akio Morita, however, was in his early twenties and had spent the final months of the war developing heat-seeking missiles. Japan was far from fielding workable guided missiles, but the project gave Morita a glimpse of the future. It was becoming possible to envision wars won not by riveters on assembly lines but by weapons that could identify targets and maneuver themselves automatically. The idea seemed like science fiction, but Morita was vaguely aware of new developments in electronic computation that might make it possible for machines to “think” by solving math problems like adding, multiplying, or finding a square root.

Of course, the idea of using devices to compute wasn’t new. People have flipped their fingers up and down since Homo sapiens first learned to count. The ancient Babylonians invented the abacus to manipulate large numbers, and for centuries people multiplied and divided by moving wooden beads back and forth across these wooden grids. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, the growth of big bureaucracies in government and business required armies of human “computers,” office workers armed with pen, paper, and occasionally simple mechanical calculators—gearboxes that could add, subtract, multiply, divide, and calculate basic square roots.

These living, breathing computers could tabulate payrolls, track sales, collect census results, and sift through the data on fires and droughts that were needed to price insurance policies. During the Great Depression, America’s Works Progress Administration, looking to employ jobless office workers, set up the Mathematical Tables Project. Several hundred human “computers” sat at rows of desks in a Manhattan office building and tabulated logarithms and exponential functions. The project published twenty-eight volumes of the results of complex functions, with titles such as Tables of Reciprocals of the Integers from 100,000 Through 200,009, presenting 201 pages covered in tables of numbers.

Organized groups of human calculators showed the promise of computation, but also the limits of using brains to compute. Even when brains were enhanced by using mechanical calculators, humans worked slowly. A person looking to use the results of the Mathematical Tables Project had to flip through the pages of one of the twenty-eight volumes to find the result of a specific logarithm or exponent. The more calculations that were needed, the more pages had to be flipped through.

Meanwhile, the demand for calculations kept growing. Even before World War II, money was flowing into projects to produce more capable mechanical computers, but the war accelerated the hunt for computing power. Several countries’ air forces developed mechanical bombsights to help aviators hit their targets. Bomber crews entered the wind speed and altitude by turning knobs, which moved metal levers that adjusted glass mirrors. These knobs and levers “computed” altitudes and angles more exactly than any pilot could, focusing the sight as the plane homed in on its target. However, the limitations were obvious. Such bombsights only considered a few inputs and provided a single output: when to drop the bomb. In perfect test conditions, America’s bombsights were more accurate than pilots’ guesswork. When deployed in the skies above Germany, though, only 20 percent of American bombs fell within one thousand feet of their target. The war was decided by the quantity of bombs dropped and artillery shells fired, not by the knobs on the mechanical computers that tried and usually failed to guide them.

More accuracy required more calculations. Engineers eventually began replacing mechanical gears in early computers with electrical charges. Early electric computers used the vacuum tube, a lightbulb-like metal filament enclosed in glass. The electric current running through the tube could be switched on and off, performing a function not unlike an abacus bead moving back and forth across a wooden rod. A tube turned on was coded as a 1 while a vacuum tube turned off was a 0. These two digits could produce any number using a system of binary counting—and therefore could theoretically execute many types of computation.

Moreover, vacuum tubes made it possible for these digital computers to be reprogrammed. Mechanical gears such as those in a bombsight could only perform a single type of calculation because each knob was physically attached to levers and gears. The beads on an abacus were constrained by the rods on which they moved back and forth. However, the connections between vacuum tubes could be reorganized, enabling the computer to run different calculations.

This was a leap forward in computing—or it would have been, if not for the moths. Because vacuum tubes glowed like lightbulbs, they attracted insects, requiring regular “debugging” by their engineers. Also like lightbulbs, vacuum tubes often burned out. A state-of-the-art computer called ENIAC, built for the U.S. Army at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945 to calculate artillery trajectories, had eighteen thousand vacuum tubes. On average, one tube malfunctioned every two days, bringing the entire machine to a halt and sending technicians scrambling to find and replace the broken part. ENIAC could multiply hundreds of numbers per second, faster than any mathematician. Yet it took up an entire room because each of its eighteen thousand tubes was the size of a fist. Clearly, vacuum tube technology was too cumbersome, too slow, and too unreliable. So long as computers were moth-ridden monstrosities, they’d only be useful for niche applications like code breaking, unless scientists could find a smaller, faster, cheaper switch.

bbbenjamin

mikiasuka

楼主难道是少前玩家？

lans0625

thanks

watern

呵呵war

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mikiasuka 发表于 2022-10-24 00:13
楼主难道是少前玩家？

只是把原文贴出来，看看有没有感兴趣的，一起读一下，谈谈看法，仅此而已。

student321

kanakan

icroad

资料不错

nuoan

Thanks for sharing

andy2000a

thank you