[xg15]

From the "Overview" page:

> Microchips – also referred to as integrated circuits – are considered to be among the greatest technological achievements of the last century. Their invention has paved the way for a digital revolution that keeps changing the world to the present day.

...

> The ENIAC computer from 1946 had over 17.000 vacuum tubes and suffered a tube failure on average every two days, which was time-consuming to troubleshoot and repair. With the invention of the transistor in 1947 by Bell Labs, the components became significantly smaller, but the transistors were still wired together individually. This reduced power consumption of those computers and their overall size, but not their wiring complexity. It was not before the invention of integrated circuits before computers became way more efficient and easier to operate and maintain.

I find it on some level hilarious that one of the fundamental breakthroughs that allowed the technological revolution pick up speed and perception-wise cross the barrier from "sophisticated machinery" to "magic" was, in some sense, proper cable management.

[jpm_sd]

It's really /elimination/ of cable management. Essentially the same thing that makes printed circuit boards superior to wire wrapping. Turned a manual labor process into a (photo)lithographic process. Not that different from the replacement of hand-lettered manuscripts with the output of a printing press!

In larger electronic and electromechanical systems, cables and connectors ("harnessing", collectively) are still major weak points.

[agumonkey]

I guess with scale, the tiniests of details become the bottleneck :)