A thought on chip collecting for the new year

[gmphillips3]

How many people, going about their daily lives today, will have any impact on the world 1000 years from now? Not many. Your descendants might, but for most of us personally, it will be as if we never existed at all.

As a chip collector however, you could very likely have an impact on world 1000 years from now.

In 1000 years, people may well see the invention of the computer as the single most important invention in the history of mankind.

The chips we are saving from the smelter today, may very well
still be in existence in museums 1000 years from now.

Because of us, future generations will actually be able to see the first microchips instead of just reading about them in a book and wondered
what they looked like.

A musuem tour guide, in the year 3005 may well point to a case of vintage microchips and say "thanks to a handful of collectors in the early 2000's, these priceless examples of the first microchips were saved for future generations".

[chip68]

All very true; however, the first microchips weren't made by Intel in the 1970s... They were pioneered by Fairchild and Texas Instruments in the early 1960s, and they've impacted virtually every area of the electronics industry, not just computers. That's why I began collecting chips myself almost 30 years ago, and eventually decided to make designing them my career.

Hopefully in the coming year collectors will start broadening their horizons and begin seeing the historical value in these rarest of all integrated circuits from the dawn of the space age.

http://smithsonianchips.si.edu/texas/t_050.htm
http://www.wps.com/archives/solid-state-datasheets/Datasheets/Fairchild-Micrologic1/index.html
http://www.memagazine.org/backissues/june00/features/ic/ic.html

- CMW