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What if Humanity forgot how to make CPUs?
(youtu.be)
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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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Well to forget, hundreds of books would need to be destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people killed.
And the work of Sam Zeelof showed that with a projector and some standard chemicals that we could resume 1978 lithography https://sam.zeloof.xyz/ and it would only take 2-3 smart people to get it to 300nm. At which point we would have 87% of current CPU performance in a higher energy envelope. (Think the first generation K8 processors in the 940 pin packages (80w, 3ghz))
So in effect, not much will happen.
This is about institutional memory. Like we know how to make a cassette tape player, but we can't actually do it.
There are a half dozen people on YouTube today that literally made their own cassette encoding and decoding circuits for the Kansas City Standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_standard
Which is good enough to bootstrap 1990s grade computers.
Never underestimate the power librarians protect in their hallowed walls.