General > General Technical Chat

"if it wasn't for the invention of X we wouldn't have Y"

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Brumby:

--- Quote from: Circlotron on August 21, 2022, 12:03:31 am ---And what if someone had invented really really good batteries in the late 1800s? So good that no one would have bothered with internal combustion engines? So much of the 20th century would have been different. Oil rich nations would have remained a backwater. Probably fewer wars. Less environmental damage of the type we see today. But I expect people collectively would have found another way to do the horrible things they do.

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I would expect a change in the focus for resources.  For example, instead of securing sources of oil there might have been similar efforts in securing sources of lithium or rare earth materials.

Kleinstein:

--- Quote from: jmelson on August 20, 2022, 07:52:19 pm ---
--- Quote from: tom66 on August 20, 2022, 09:23:29 am ---A BJT-based CPU would probably require a refrigeration system to keep it sufficiently cool at just 50 MIPS. 

Are there examples of non-CMOS CPUs that were commercially produced?

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CPUs on an IC?  Yes, HP made a series of machines with Silicon on sapphire substrates, for lower parasitic capacitance.
Under a microscope, you can see thriugh the chip like glass.  I don't know what the circuit topolgy was.
IBM made the 370 series with the bipolar junction transistor technology they called MST4, which was essentially similar to Motorola's ECL.
The original Z-80 was implemented in XMOS, I think.
Jon

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Quite a few of the early 8 bit CPUs (8080, 6502, Z80) were either NMOS or PMOS. There was also a mix with MOSFETs and BJTs. They later switched to CMOS for lower power and better performance, though it needs a more complicated process.
Somewhat later there was even some ECL type CPU on a chip, to get a high clock speed.  At least in the early days, when running at high clock speed the power consumption for CMOS was not that much better than ECL. It only improved with reduced feature size. WIth BJTs it gets increasingly more difficult to make them very small. The main advantage in power consumption with CMOS comes in the idle state or logic in a static state, like much of memory.

Silicon on saphire is just a different substrate, but the process on top could still be CMOS, but also others.

Some of the inventions / discoveries just have there time to come.  If it does not happen in one lab, it will come somehere else.  Some parts even got invented multiple times - so reinventing the wheel is nothing new.

Zero999:

--- Quote from: pcprogrammer on August 21, 2022, 05:45:11 am ---
--- Quote from: Circlotron on August 21, 2022, 12:03:31 am ---And what if someone had invented really really good batteries in the late 1800s? So good that no one would have bothered with internal combustion engines? So much of the 20th century would have been different. Oil rich nations would have remained a backwater. Probably fewer wars. Less environmental damage of the type we see today. But I expect people collectively would have found another way to do the horrible things they do.

--- End quote ---

How different would things be if oil was not discovered? Modern society would probably not exist as it is today. So many products depend(ed) on crude oil. Think of the petrochemical industry.
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Before oil, coal was used to make many chemicals used in industry. It can also be used to make synthetic oil.

pcprogrammer:

--- Quote from: Zero999 on August 21, 2022, 06:05:24 pm ---Before oil, coal was used to make many chemicals used in industry. It can also be used to make synthetic oil.

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Coal just as oil is a finite resource, so if they run out, it leaves us with a problem other than the transportation and energy sector falling on its ass, but I'm not very knowledgeable in the field of chemistry and wonder how big a problem it would actually be for production of goods when oil or coal would no longer be available?

jpanhalt:
Coal according to Wikipedia is mostly carbon.  The "valence" of carbon is zero.  Oil is a mixture mostly of hydrocarbons.  The "valence" of carbon in a hydrocarbon is something negative, such as -4.   Oxidation of carbon (i.e., increasing its valence) produces energy.  Reduction (decreasing its valence) requires energy.  Most of what we consider consumer plastics/petrochemicals require reduced carbon.  Synthesis could be done (grad students used to exercise their brains with organic syntheses beginning with carbon), but requires at lot more resources to do compared to starting with oil.

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