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Dilbert Hiding On Your CPU

Posted by Zonk on from the they-need-hobbies dept.

Case_Argentina writes "Interesting article and photos on News.com about a guy who does microscopy photography discovering hidden images in computer chips. The images, made by tiny wires connecting the deeper layers of the chip, were left there by engineers leaving messages to competitors, or just having plain fun. Snoopy, Daffy Duck, Dilbert, Dogbert and lots of silicon characters and images can be seen at The Silicon Zoo." Update: 10/15 06:27 GMT by Z : As some readers have pointed out, if history serves you can look forward to reading about this again in 2007.

5 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. A very cool site, but it's been around for a while by plover · · Score: 4, Interesting
    It was new to me about six years ago, anyway. I had purchased a $5.00 Radio Shack microscope so I could take in the craftsmanship of an old piece of core memory I'd come across. (It was 16KB and the core took up about 8" x 10" on the card). I have been collecting old memory, and had discovered I could easily pry the aluminum cans off of IBM chips with my Swiss Army Knife. I was looking at a late 1980s vintage chip and discovered a design! Later on after discovering a link to the Silicon Zoo I contacted the author. We exchanged notes, I dropped the chip in the mail, and he photographed it beautifully, and put it up on his site. I thought it was really cool.

    I've looked at a lot of chips since then, but the old 100x pocket microscope can't make out any details on these new high density chips. When they started cramming billions of transistors 60nm apart, there's very little chance of spotting anything optically.

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    John
  2. Copyright? by tepples · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Are these images used with permission? Or have the copyright or trademark owners of these images taken any legal action against chip makers that use these images without permission?

  3. Someday... by Landshark17 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...will archeologists unearth computers and try do learn about our primitive culture by seeing what we drew on chips, kind of like archeologists today look at cave painting.

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    This sig is false.
  4. Re:Not new but still fun by NanoGradStudent · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm not sure about the exact duplicate part, but here's at least one Easter Egg targeted towards Soviet IC reverse engineers.

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    Just a little guy, y'know?
  5. Feynmann's text by Spy+der+Mann · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This might be a little off-topic, but hey, this is slashdot. We need to have an interesting link on funny stories once in a while.

    Feynmann's text on nanotechnology - viewed with a microscope.