Re: Computers are evil dark magic?

On Thu, 7/30/2026 7:33 AM, Mr. Man-wai Chang wrote:
> On 7/29/2026 11:31 PM, Paul wrote:
>>
>> https://www.reddit.com/r/DiWHY/comments/18hb0eg/pc_with_over_100000_lumens_of_rgb_light/
>> You can see the light, outside his house.
>> I would say it's not total darkness.
> 
> 
> That's a computer chassis wrapping the motherboard,
> on which chips were mounted, not the hidden dungeon
> within the chips where computation happens. :)
> 

If you had to build these things, you'd have more respect for them.

You can build computers out of jelly bean chips. You can even build
very large circuit functions, using raw transistors.

   https://hackaday.io/project/171966-4-bit-ttl-cpu

*******

One reason the chips are inside black epoxy, is the "photoelectric effect".
For some chips, you can connect an earphone, and you can hear the
flow of bias current, if you shine a light on the bare silicon die.
It is for this reason, that it should be kept dark and under the
black epoxy, so no "circuit-upset" is caused by the photoelectric effect.

An example of the photoelectric effect, was when Byte Magazine did
a project, to use an early DRAM chip, as a "webcam". The DRAM array
can image pixels. The visual quality is not very good, there would be
"stuck pixels", "dim pixels", but, it works. This is why the DRAM
is normally covered, so that does not happen.

Look at the picture at the top of this page. It's actually a pretty
good image, captured with a DRAM chip with the lid off it.

   https://hackaday.com/2014/04/05/taking-pictures-with-a-dram-chip/

They work better, when it is quiet and dark in there. They
can concentrate on their job better.

    Paul