I realized the other day that I don’t actually know how they made computers go from the size of the room, to something on a desk and eventually into my pocket. Or a floppy disk to a CD. So, how do they just “make it better” while also reducing size?
In: Engineering
To manufacture things smaller, you need more precise machinery to make it. But to make the precise machinery, you need more precise tools to make *that*. So there are slow, but steady improvements where the technology we already have allows us to develop better technology. Cost is also a huge part of this. Once machines that could physically assemble small electronics (pick and place machines) became cheaper it became practical for more companies to make small electronics affordably, while before they might have been assembled by hand with a larger size and greater cost. As these machines make electronics cheaply, it becomes cheaper to make the machines as well, and the ability to assemble such small and precise things becomes more widespread.
Computer chips themselves are made with a complicated electrical/chemical/physical process that has many factors involved in it. There are only a few companies in the world that produce state-of-the-art processors like the ones in modern laptops and phones. They have a combination of the best knowledge and the best equipment, which is constantly refined to make them better and cheaper (cost reductions mostly come from fewer mistakes happening in manufacturing so more of what they make actually works and can be sold). There are so many precise tweaks and refinements, and so much expensive equipment that if one of these factories was lost, it would take quite a long time to regain those capabilities even if you had people who knew how it worked.
Basically it’s a lot of different technologies combining and building upon each other to make things smaller and cheaper.
What you’re describing is, primarily, the concept of “miniaturization”.
It’s where advancements in engineering and manufacturing allow for increasingly smaller sizes of things. Historically things weren’t bigger because people preferred them that way, they were bigger because they had to be. The first commercial hard drives were the size of refrigerators out of necessity, not desire for bulk.
Here’s a simple example. In early computing we didn’t have modern transistors, we had to use vacuum tubes for our logic circuits. The famed ENIAC computer of the mid-20th century used almost 18,000 vacuum tubes (each the size, more or less, of a flashlight). Each one of these tubes was manipulated with electricity into an on/off (a binary) to run the computer. It took enormous amounts of energy and the whole thing was the size of a school gymnasium.
The introduction of transistors absolutely revolutionized computing because now what had been a big delicate glass tube the size of a flashlight that consumed a huge amount of energy was a little teeny tiny postage stamp size thing that used very little energy. Soon each postage stamp size thing had more than one transistor in it, then thousands, then hundreds, then *millions* as the technology matured and we got better and packing more and more of these tiny little “switches” into silicon wafers.
The same thing happened, in parallel with data storage. We kept increasing the density of storage material beacuse we kept improving the methods of 1) making the storage mediums and 2) reading the storage mediums.
CDs are a plastic/aluminum wafer with little tiny microscopic pits that a laser reads. DVDs are the same thing, but the wafer is made with better tolerance and the laser is better too. Blu-ray? Same thing. Even better tolerances with a better laser. It’s all fundamentally the same concept just refined with better and better equipment.
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