Alltransistors -

He soldered them with a jeweler’s loupe and trembling hands. The connections grew into a Gordian knot of copper, gold, and indium. The circuit was monstrous: a thousand different switching speeds, a thousand different voltage thresholds, a thousand different personalities. By all laws of electrical engineering, it should have done nothing. It should have oscillated into noise or simply melted.

But on the third Thursday of November, as rain drummed on the shed’s tin roof, Silas connected the last wire—a hair-thin bond from a gallium-nitride HEMT to a germanium point-contact. He placed a single D-cell battery on the bench. He held his breath. alltransistors

A week later, a grad student from MIT found him. Silas had passed away in his chair, a soldering iron still warm in his hand. The Alltransistors was still humming. The D-cell battery was dead, but the circuit had somehow switched to a new power source: the ambient electromagnetic noise of the planet itself. Radio static, lightning strikes, the whisper of a thousand cell towers. He soldered them with a jeweler’s loupe and

And each one, in its own distorted, leaky, noisy way, answered: Yes. By all laws of electrical engineering, it should

The calculation they performed was not binary. It was not a sum or a logical test. It was a single, silent question, passed from the oldest transistor to the newest: Are we still a switch?

People thought he was mad. The IEEE Spectrum ran a hit piece: “The Ultimate Retro-Computing Grail or Hoarding?”. Wired called him “The Sisyphus of Silicon.” But the parts came. From basement hoarders in Ohio, from Chinese recyclers who pulled rare-earth elements from e-waste mountains, from a decommissioned Cray-2 and a broken hearing aid from 1974. He mounted each transistor in a custom frame of machined aluminum, like a specimen. Each one was labeled: 2N3904 (General Electric, 1966). J201 (Fairchild, 1972). BS170 (Zetex, 1989).

From the 1947 point-contact transistor—a cranky, wet-fingered thing of gold foil and plastic—to the latest 2-nanometer gate-all-around finFETs that were barely a dozen atoms wide. He wanted them all, holding hands, performing one single, useless, perfect calculation.