One of the facinating and geeky things we have on the walls of Absolute Computers is blown up picture of a microchip.
This VSLI CMOS chip, containing 150,000 transistors, was designed in 1988 in Research Triangle Park. It is roughly the size of a dime. It provided “high speed” 16 Mbit/s communications between computers using the IEEE 802.5 protocol. Current technology would allow the equivalent of 20,000 of these to be manufactured on one chip:
