According to Rosenberg, after further extensive testing, and consultation with the major tube manufacturers, whose response was that “no one else had ever complained about their product, and they had enough customers without us,” von Neumann was informed that “there were no reliable tubes, and no reliable resistors.” The response from him was that “we would have to learn how to design a reliable 40-stage machine with thousands of unreliable components,” said Rosenberg.
Unreliable Parts
Mega-projects orchestrate unreliable elements into coherent wholes.
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The hardware of modern computers is remarkably reliable, and needs to be. A computer like Eagle does a cycle of work in 220 billionths of a second. If it tended to fail only once every million cycles, it would be a very unreliable contraption indeed.
Herbie is walking at his own slower speed. He is the one who is governing throughput for the troop as a whole. In fact, whoever is moving the slowest in the troop is the one who will govern throughput.
But even that wasn’t good enough, not for a machine whose tubes would number in the tens of thousands: the odds of one’s failing at a critical moment were still just too great. So after working and reworking the numbers, the group decided that the only answer was redundancy. Every computer in the air-defense system would have to be paired with an identical backup computer that would be ready to take over at a moment’s notice.
So many of the wartime and postwar breakthroughs—the Manhattan Project, radar, the transistor—were clearly group efforts, a compilation of the ideas and inventions of individuals bound together with common purposes and complementary talents. And the phone system, with its almost unfathomable complexity, was by definition a group effort. It was also the case, as Shockley would later point out, that by the middle of the twentieth century the process of innovation in electronics had progressed to the point that a vast amount of multidisciplinary expertise was needed to bring any given project to fruition.
The making of NT is at once a primer on software, a portrait of a community of programmers and a gritty melodrama about the perilous task of managing complexity in an age of information. ... And writing good code is increasingly the work of large teams. Yet such teams often sink into mediocrity because their size alone can breed bureaucracy and sterility. The challenge for every large team is to organize its diverse talents while encouraging leadership and flexibility.
Inside the Skunk Works, we were a small, intensely cohesive group consisting of about fifty veteran engineers and designers and a hundred or so expert machinists and shop workers. ... for years we functioned as the CIA’s unofficial “toy-makers,” building for it fabulously successful spy planes, while developing an intimate working partnership with the agency that was unique between government and private industry. Our relations with the Air Force blue-suiters were love-hate—depending on whose heads Kelly was knocking together at any given time to keep the Skunk Works as free as possible from bureaucratic interlopers or the imperious wills of overbearing generals.
Design redundancy and layers of defense: that’s Swiss cheese. The metaphor illustrates the futility of trying to find the one underlying cause of an accident (usually some person) and punishing the culprit. Instead, we need to think about systems, about all the interacting factors that lead to human error and then to accidents, and devise ways to make the systems, as a whole, more reliable.
Thus sometimes mistakes occur. Then it is failure analysis—the discipline that seeks to reassemble the whole into something greater than the sum of its broken parts—that provides the engineer with caveats for future designs. Ironically, structural failure and not success improves the safety of later generations of a design.
The result was a machine with hundreds of thousands of components that took tens of billions of dollars and several decades to develop. The miracle isn’t simply that EUV lithography works, but that it does so reliably enough to produce chips cost-effectively. ... Producing advanced semiconductors, however, has relied on some of the most complex machinery ever made. ASML’s EUV lithography tool is the most expensive mass-produced machine tool in history, so complex it’s impossible to use without extensive training from ASML personnel, who remain on-site for the tool’s entire life span. Each EUV scanner has an ASML logo on its side. But ASML’s expertise, the company readily admits, was its ability to orchestrate a far-flung network of optics experts, software designers, laser companies, and many others whose capabilities were needed to make the dream of EUV a reality.