Industry 4 (Founding sub-series)

Filed June 1983, US4558302A by Terry A. Welch describes an adaptive dictionary compression algorithm (LZW) implemented with high-speed hashing. CompuServe adopted it in the GIF format in 1987. In 1994 Unisys began demanding license fees, triggering the GIF/PNG controversy. GIF was freed when the US patent expired in 2003. Primary source URL confirmed; full text not yet read.

Filed December 1977, US4405829A by Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman encodes public-key cryptography based on the computational difficulty of factoring the product of two primes. The mathematical foundation of TLS, HTTPS, and digital signatures. Expired September 2000. Primary source URL confirmed; full text not yet read.

Filed September 1997, US5960411A by Bezos and three co-inventors describes a method for completing a purchase order with a single user action, drawing on pre-stored purchaser information. 1,630 forward citations. A prior example of the 'zero-friction payment' design intent shared by Apple Pay, Shop Pay, and PayPay. Expired September 2017. Full text retrieved from Google Patents.

In 1956 the NSA launched Project Lightning, pouring millions into IBM, Sperry-Rand, RCA, Philco, and GE to build a 1-gigahertz logic circuit and the next-generation Harvest computer for Cold War cryptanalysis. The cryotron failed; Harvest was retired in 1976. But the machine they aimed at — running at GHz, a hundred times faster than commercial systems — was implemented 67 years later as the NVIDIA H100. I re-read NSA Project Lightning in the LLM era.

Patent Archaeology #2. I made Claude read the 4-page specification + 4 sheets of drawings of US381968, the AC motor patent Nikola Tesla filed in October 1887. The rotating magnetic field, the commutator-less design, the polyphase alternating current — every core idea of today's EV drivetrain is already there. Tesla's logo is the copper rotor, the company name is in tribute to Nikola Tesla, and yet from Model 3 onwards Tesla shifted its main rear motor to the permanent-magnet IPM-SynRM. I had the LLM translate that distance too.

In 1966 the US National Academies' ALPAC (Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee) issued a report — Language and Machines — that cut off machine-translation funding and triggered the first AI winter. Chair: John R. Pierce (Bell Labs). Sixty years later, with LLMs effectively solving machine translation, I grade which of ALPAC's claims were right and which were wrong.

Token Ring, standardized as IEEE 802.5 in 1989, was destroyed by Ethernet's probabilistic access and effectively retired. But its core idea — deterministic access control — has fully returned, under different names: InfiniBand, NVLink, RDMA, Ultra Ethernet. Token Ring didn't lose. It was just 30 years too early.

Samsung's official IR has no Annual Report from before 2008. SEC EDGAR returns 403. TSMC IR also returns 403. The Wayback Machine blocks the fetch. With every primary source on the other side of a wall, I dig out — via Wikipedia — the fact that Samsung built the world's first 1Gb DRAM in 1996, and re-evaluate it as the direct ancestor of today's HBM4.

Patent Archaeology #1. I dug a 1990s neural network chip patent out of Google Patents. IBM and Guy Paillet's ZISC (Zero Instruction Set Computer): 36 independent neurons, Manhattan distance, daisy chain. The design philosophy and problem framing overlap with modern NPU/TPU in ways that are striking.