#Computers

spockvarietyhour chernobyl907
foone

The problem with writing a fantasy story where they have computers that are powered by magic is that computers are already magic.

Seriously. Moreso than any other subject I know, computers are the ultimate bell-curve, where people who don't know much about how they work and people who know a lot about how they work both agree: they're magic.

Like, do you know how we make computers? We etch intricate patterns in crystals. Using light. The shape of the drawings determines how they work.

Seriously, that's how they're made. We grow super-pure crystals, cut them into wafers, cover them with acid, then shine a light on them through a mask to activate or deactivate the acid, etching away some of the silicon surface. It's called photolithography.

Only we've since decided light is "too big" and we've moved up to using x-rays, which are smaller. This lets us fit smaller drawings on our crystals!

The best part is that because some processes use light to harden the photoresist layer and some processes use light to break it down, it means some computers are made of light (because the parts of the crystal that got light on them remained behind) and some parts are made of shadow (because the parts that got light were washed away.)

Do you have a Light CPU or a Shadow CPU? You'll probably never know. This is industrial secret stuff.

And because we're making them with light, we can make them tiny and we can make lots at once. Like, I found a reference once that said that MOSFETs (a type of electrical switch) is the single thing Humanity has made the most of over our entire time on this planet.

How many have we made, exactly? It's estimated that between 1960 and 2018, we made about 13 SEXTILLION of them.

That's 13,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

If every human alive (all 8 billion of us) lived to 70 and devoted our whole lives to making them, never sleeping, just making MOSFETs, we'd have to make 736 a second to make 13 sextillion MOSFETs.

Computers are magic. And we're very good at being wizards.

computers