Fairchild Semiconductor
This album is an extreme exercise in manifestation or perhaps overly-optimistic multiverse manipulation.
We do not live in a universe where there’s a lavish TV series about Fairchild Semiconductor. But we *should* and I want to do my utmost to make that universe this one.
Having spent hours researching various magazine articles, citations and physics way over my head, I’m more than a little obsessed by Fairchild and the long shadow that one company and all its Fairchildren cast over our lives today.
I’m the generation that lived through the ’80s tech revolution. I wasn’t clever enough to be a coder (no maths!) but I learned a bit of assembly language, wrote a few terrible ASCII-based games, the usual for a geeky kid of my generation. This is when I first started to be interested in processors, noticing that some home computers used something called a ‘6502’ and others a ‘Z80.’ Back then, I had no idea that one tech company had so influenced computer history, from developing the first monolithic integrated circuit to guiding us to the Moon.
I would love this album to inspire a real TV series that explored the personalities *and* the science of those times. Ideally, it would be a co-production between, say, Netflix and the BBC. There would be a one-hour dramatic show, telling the story and then a follow-up one-hour behind-the-science episode. I want people to know the fascinating history behind the last great industrial revolution, without which today’s inter-connected, inter-dependent world would be impossible.
Four transistors on the first ever monolithic IC in 1960, sixteen thousand million on Apple’s M1 chip in 2020. I want to hear that story!
released May 19, 2021
