Courtyard Houses: The Great Masters of a Nation Hidden Within

Those were two chips.

Both pieces are encased in grayish-purple ceramic, with nine golden feet extending from each side, and a small golden metal piece embedded at the top.

Gao Jianguo mentally identified the characters on the metal pieces one by one. The first five characters of the first line of one piece were c8008, and the first five characters of the other piece were c1103.

The owner of that boutique is quite a character; this item would probably be one of the store's prized possessions.

Chips like 8008 and 1103, which start with the letter C, are high-end products produced in the early days. The gold color isn't painted on; it's real gold plated on.

Later, compared to it, plastic-packaged goods starting with "D" were not even in the same league.

Back when Gao Jianguo was in college, C8008 and C1103 models in such good condition that they could be given as gifts were not cheap.

Big shipment!

At this moment, Gao Jianguo felt even more excited than a fisherman who had caught a big fish. He wished he could be like the fisherman and stroll around the city with the fish in his hand to show off.

The Intel C8008, launched in 1972, is widely recognized as the world's first usable 8-bit commercial CPU. It features an 18-pin dual in-line package, a maximum clock speed of 0.8 MHz, and executes approximately 80,000 instructions per second. It has a 16 KB addressable space and contains 3,500 transistors.

The C1103, launched by Intel in 1970, was the first commercially available dynamic random access memory chip, which is what people now call RAM.

The package is also an 18-pin dual in-line package, just like the C8008. Intel can even save costs on the packaging.

The capacity is 1k bits, which is equivalent to 128 bytes. Each bit is composed of a three-transistor storage unit, and the total number of transistors is more than 3,000.

These two things seem incredibly weak in terms of performance and capacity to people in later generations, but in 1959, they were incredibly powerful.

For example, on August 1, 1958, the 103 computer head, which was copied from the older M-3 vacuum tube computer, ran at a speed of thirty times per second. Later, it was improved and increased to three thousand times per second.

The 104 vacuum tube computer, which was copied in 1959, had a processing speed of 10,000 operations per second.

However, the computing speed mentioned here refers to floating-point operations. If it were converted to instruction count, the number would jump significantly. Furthermore, both machines have word lengths of 30 bits or more, which is much better than the 8008.

In terms of speed and word length, the domestic machines at this time were comparable to the 8008 in each other's strengths and weaknesses. However, these machines were all huge, filling an entire room. Not to mention their power consumption, with thousands of vacuum tubes. Just thinking about it makes my scalp tingle.

The cost was even more staggering. It is said that one 104 machine cost two million RMB, which was two million RMB in 1959.

How difficult were these machines to build? Just look at the production volume to understand. Only thirty-eight units of the 103rd machine were ever built, and that's the total production volume.

Having discussed the 8008, let's return to the 1103. Compared to the domestically developed magnetic core memory that was successfully developed in 1959, this thing has three advantages: faster speed, smaller size, and cheaper price.

Just look at the 103 core memory and you'll understand.

A capacity of 1,024 bytes would require several server racks, roughly the size of a modern 42u server rack.

Gao Jianguo slowly sensed these two things in his mind, and his heart was burning with excitement.

Although we don't know what this thing will look like after being extracted, localized and modified by the system, even if it can't be used, this deal is already incredibly profitable just because of the general-purpose 8008 CPU architecture.

Unable to contain himself, Gao Jianguo rushed to Chief Engineer Chen's office and asked Old Chen for leave.

Seeing his flushed face and thick neck, Old Chen thought he was sick and asked him several questions.

Once the fake permit was approved, Gao Jianguo hopped on his bike and sped off, his legs moving like they were powered by motors, as if he wanted to stomp the pedals right into the ground.

He sprinted home in one breath, locked all the doors and windows, opened the curtains and then closed them tightly one by one. Gao Jianguo found his way to the south room—this room was temporarily empty and nothing was placed there.

He plans to extract the two precious babies here.

After the system is revamped, who knows what kind of weird things will pop up? Maybe it will really be like 103, filling up an entire room.

Gao Jianguo stood outside the south room door, not daring to go inside, afraid that he would be squeezed to death.

Upon opening the container, two more items appeared in the south room, along with two paper documents placed beside them.

It consists of four 50-centimeter square circuit boards stacked on top of each other, separated by copper pillars in the middle.

The four boards are densely packed with identical units, each unit consisting of three crystal transistors and some resistors, capacitors and inductors.

The boards are connected by signal lines, and on the edge of the topmost board, there is a circuit made up of transistors and resistors and capacitors, as well as a row of interfaces.

Another thing, also about 50 centimeters square and a meter tall, is a cabinet. Inside, there are several circuit boards stacked. Each board is made up of different circuits using components such as transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors, and inductors. The circuits on some of the boards look similar. At the bottom of the cabinet is something that looks like a power supply.

Gao Jianguo picked up two paper documents, quickly scanned them, grinned, and burst into laughter. The system's thoughtfulness was truly unparalleled.

There's not much to guess; that four-layer board stacked together is the C1103 memory chip—no, it should be called a 128-byte DRAM module.

The cabinet is a modified version of the C8008; you can just call it a CPU module cabinet.

As for how those two fingernail-sized chips ended up like this—that's thanks to the system.

The C8008 and C1103 that came out in the 1970s could not have been extracted in their original form in 1959.

Fortunately, although both technologies are advanced, the underlying principles are straightforward. To put it bluntly, even modern CPUs and memory are essentially the same thing.

Simply put, it involves using integrated circuit technology to create thousands of transistors on a silicon wafer, along with auxiliary components such as resistors and capacitors, to assemble a variety of logic gates, which are then further assembled into various functional modules. The final product is a CPU or memory.

In the past, when CPU manufacturers released new products, they always liked to boast about the number of transistors. This is because the number of transistors represented a higher level of manufacturing process, functionality, and performance.

When extracting the system, they did it in reverse: they disassembled the entire chip back into individual transistors and peripheral components. Using the transistors and electronic components available in China in 1959, they managed to reassemble the CPU and DRAM functions completely.

In his past life, Gao Jianguo had watched countless videos of expert CPU DIY projects online, including how to solder a CPU from a 74 series logic chip or even a triode. He never imagined that he would see the real thing with his own eyes in this lifetime.

What's even more amazing is that the system thoughtfully provides explanatory materials.

It was true, Gao Jianguo almost burst into tears.

It seems that the system's extraction method operates according to the "definition".

When you extract a mobile phone, the definition of the item is "communication tool". With system modifications, at most you can get a walkie-talkie, but the chip inside the phone can't be extracted.

Honestly, it's fortunate that these are first-generation products like the C8008 and C1103, with only a little over three thousand transistors in total. If they were chips with tens or hundreds of thousands of transistors like those in mobile phones, there would be no way to fix them.

There are actually many different versions of the statements about domestically produced computers in the article, due to historical reasons. I used the one that I think is more appropriate.