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The Homogenization of Computer Science - Victor Zhong

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In the analog-computing gallery of the Mountain View Computer History Museum, there is a photograph of Bob Widlar captioned with his line, "Digital circuits? I'd rather fight than switch!" Widlar was among the most brilliant and eccentric analog integrated-circuit designers of his generation, the man behind some of the first widely successful monolithic operational amplifiers. The line is in character: he spent his career, by most accounts, refusing to switch. He was, of course, wrong about digital. The next several decades belonged to it, and the analog computers in the gallery around his photograph are now museum pieces - though the analog IC industry he helped found is larger than ever. The picture stays with me anyway. Widlar held out because he believed his paradigm was the field. The people who actually carried computer science forward across that transition were the ones who could see both rooms at once: trained broadly enough to recognize that the questions had not changed even

The Homogenization of Computer Science - Victor Zhong The Homogenization of Computer Science By Victor Zhong, May 13, 2026 In the analog-computing gallery of the Mountain View Computer History Museum, there is a photograph of Bob Widlar captioned with his line, "Digital circuits? I'd rather fight than switch!" Widlar was among the most brilliant and eccentric analog integrated-circuit designers of his generation, the man behind some of the first widely successful monolithic operational amplifiers. The line is in character: he spent his career, by most accounts, refusing to switch. He was, of c

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