the.com/circuitry
invisible plumbing for lightning, taming chaos into thought one switch at a time
means The complete system of electrical circuits and conductive pathways within a device, through which current flows to make it work.
from From "circuit," which traces back through Old French to Latin "circuitus" — "a going around" — built from "circum" (around) and "ire" (to go). A circuit was first literally a journey around something, a closed loop you could walk; only much later did electricity adopt the word for its own looping paths. The suffix "-ry" (as in machinery, jewelry) bundles the individual circuits into a collective whole — the entire round-trip network of the machine.
- transistor count
- modern chips pack tens of billions of them
- first circuit
- 1958, a slab of germanium and wires
- size scale
- features now smaller than a virus
- binary brain
- all logic reduces to on or off
- speed limit
- signals race near the speed of light
intel 4004 — first commercial microprocessor with 2,300 transistors, released 1971
apple m1 chip — 16 billion transistors in a 5-nanometer process, launched 2020
apollo guidance computer — 64 kilobytes of memory that guided moon landings, 1969