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A Universe Inside Our Universe

For the last week or so, the business world has been abuzz with a rumor that TSMC and Broadcom will lead the breakup of struggling US chipmaker Intel. It’s big news for a reason—Intel, TSMC, and Broadcom all build semiconductors, the tiny silicon computer chips on which we have placed the minuscule building blocks of modern society, transistors. 

TSMC is the largest chip manufacturer in the world, producing some of the most advanced processors for our most advanced technology, like Apple’s M-series and Bionic chips. Yet it remains far from a household name. So, WIRED’s May 2023 issue endeavored to demystify the firm with an epic and overdue cover story entitled “I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory.” Writer Virginia Heffernan visited the company’s HQ, known in Taiwan as the Sacred Mountain of Protection, and penned a masterpiece that, beyond simply introducing TSMC and its only product, grappled with such concepts as democracy, geopolitics, capitalism, religion and, naturally, Moore’s law. 

It’s one of my favorite WIRED features thanks to its dazzling scope and signature Heffernan style. Heffernan breaks down the impossibly complex process of photolithography, assesses the consequences of dependence on a geopolitically sensitive region, reflects on the place of the US and Taiwan in computing history, and muses on the presence of the divine in our technological exploits. But it’s her striking description of transistors, the epitome of humankind’s creative and intrepid spirit, expressed in nanometers and atomic scale, that most captured my imagination. 

I spend so much time worrying about technology—its toxicity to the human mind, its ability to fracture us beyond repair. WIRED, born of techno-optimism, has been forced to do the same. It’s easy to forget how truly incredible it all is, so we continue to require writers like Heffernan to remind us. With silicon, we have “created a universe inside our universe,” she writes. It’s not a miracle, but an astonishing triumph. We might not know what tomorrow holds, but at least we know we are capable of the spectacular. This week, please share your own opinions of technological triumphs, whatever that means to you. Send me an email or comment below the story. 

See you next week,
Sam

Operation Match

Last Saturday, the day after Valentine’s Day, I shared a 2014 feature about computer scientist Chris McKinlay. While he was working toward his PhD at UCLA, he was also looking for love, so he hacked the dating site OkCupid and employed large data analysis to find it. I asked you to share your adventures in tech and love, and you did not disappoint. Reader Neal Alderman met his wife with the aid of a computer 59 years ago, using what is thought to be the very first computer-based matchmaking service. Alderman sent in a filled-out questionnaire and $3 to Operation Match, a program created by a couple of MIT undergraduates. Operation Match ran Alderman’s responses through a room-size IBM 1401 computer and sent him the names of six matches. “I called her and dated her, and we were married a few months later,” Alderman said. He also provided a bit of gossip: “There is a story that one of the originators was seeing a girl he matched with through the program. He went out of town to promote the business, and she looked up one of the other names on her list. When he got back she was engaged to the other guy.”

Tell me about your favorite WIRED stories and magazine-related memories, and each week I’ll feature one of you here. Write to me at samantha_spengler@wired.com, and include “CLASSICS” in the subject line.