Alltransistors _best_ May 2026

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.

And something happened.

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. alltransistors

He closed the circuit.

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. A week later, a grad student from MIT found him

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). The D-cell battery was dead, but the circuit