But Silas had grown tired of the new gods: AI, cloud consciousness, neuromorphic dust. They were all speed and no soul. So he retired to a shed in the Oregon rainforest and began his final project. He called it The Alltransistors .
People thought he was mad. The IEEE Spectrum ran a hit piece: “The Ultimate Retro-Computing Grail or Hoarding?”. Wired called him “The Sisyphus of Silicon.” But the parts came. From basement hoarders in Ohio, from Chinese recyclers who pulled rare-earth elements from e-waste mountains, from a decommissioned Cray-2 and a broken hearing aid from 1974. He mounted each transistor in a custom frame of machined aluminum, like a specimen. Each one was labeled: 2N3904 (General Electric, 1966). J201 (Fairchild, 1972). BS170 (Zetex, 1989). alltransistors
From the 1947 point-contact transistor—a cranky, wet-fingered thing of gold foil and plastic—to the latest 2-nanometer gate-all-around finFETs that were barely a dozen atoms wide. He wanted them all, holding hands, performing one single, useless, perfect calculation. But Silas had grown tired of the new
He left it there, singing its quiet, obsolete, essential song. And somewhere, in the dark of the Oregon rainforest, a monument to everything that ever switched from off to on continued to decide, over and over again, that being a transistor was still worth the trouble. He called it The Alltransistors