Hello and welcome back. If you follow the channel, you probably know of Antoine already,
our paleontologist, retro-electronician and musician.
We first met him two years ago, when we helped paleontologists retrieve important fossil data,
itself locked on fossil 8 inch IBM floppy drives. We successfully unlocked the data
for the greatest joy of our scientists, learned a few things about life on earth way,
way before the dinosaurs, and in the process he became a member at large of our little group.
We later visited him in is lair in Paris where he showed us his impressive CPU chips collection,
which he documents by taking amazing bare die pictures. At this point we knew he
was certifiably nuts, in a way that we fully approved, and would deserve future observing.
So when I was in Paris for Christmas at the end of last year, I paid a little visit to Antoine,
to get up to speed with his latest discoveries on chips, dinosaurs, and harpsichord pieces.
First good news, he continues his documentation of old chips unabated. For that, he has upgraded
his microscope with an automated control for taking arrays of pictures. But what’s one do to
when such systems cost thousands of dollars and you are a struggling paleontologist? Build you
own from scratch of course! Complete with retro illuminated buttons and big switches. The stepper
motors come from ancient giant disk drives. Once again, we approve of the building methods here!
Antoine loves to hunt for easter eggs on the chips, like these unexpected portraits of the
designers of this chip. It’s apparently optimized for dark field microscopy,
so it appears in negative here. He has even found dinosaurs on his chips,
which could only happen to a paleontologist! This one, on a PA-RISC chip from Hewlett-Packard.
Some of this hidden chip art is truly stunning,
like this hummingbird poicture he found, also in an HP chip.
But the big news, and part of the reason for this shout-out, is that he has started to share his
discoveries on Twitter, where he is now known as SiliconInsider. He has already garnered a solid 10
thousand followers. If you follow him, you’ll be rewarded by a constant stream of spectacular die
pictures, a lot of them unpublished so far. This will no doubt appeal to your inner silicon artist
that you never even know existed. There is so much glorious engineering hidden
inside these IC packages that we never get to celebrate. Thanks Antoine for documenting it.
He also makes these limited runs of cases incorporating one of his pictures,
the chip, and the decapped die to celebrate a chip architecture. I believe he announces
theses on his twitter thread. Here are an ARM v2 and an Intel 286 display cases. He
told me that one of the designers of the ARM chip actually got one of the cases.
He is also planning to release high quality art prints of some of his chip pictures.
Here is the front and back of his prototype Intel Pentium card print.
I have not seen these for sale yet, so stay tuned. And, count me in for that one.
And it does not stop there. Antoine is also a retro computing enthusiast,
that’s how we met in the first place. So what’s one to do when you can’t find one of the special
VRAM modules used by your Mac old video card? Well, if you are Antoine, you recreate new ones!
And you can count on him to make them extra nice, with pretty colors and silk screens.
He even went as far as including little ones and zeros in the background of the smiley mac.
This and his other retro computing creations are available on his eBay store,
along with some silicon bare die or even wafers that he also sells there.
His eBay handle is aberco, which I guess stands for his real name, Antoine Bercovici.
Antoine uses the sales of his electro-stuff is to finance his true passion, paleontology,
which sadly is a precarious way to make a living, as grants have mostly dried up in his field.
And it’s always a treat when he enthusiastically shares some of his latest discoveries.
So out comes the box of retro stuff, I mean really really retro, 60 millions years old to be precise.
No, these are not fossils, these are rocks that he picked himself on a private ranch in Wyoming.
And as Antoine puts it, these rocks tell the story of a really,
really bad day on earth. The day that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, and many other species.
Antoine put the sample under the chip microscope,
next to the watchfull eye of the Pentium prints so we could admire it.
And what we saw boggles the mind, or at least it boggles my mind. See the thick dark granular layer
in-between the two thin lighter layers? This is not of earth origin. This is from an asteroid.
The one that crashed in the Yucatan peninsula, 60 million years ago, which such force that
bits of it were ejected into space, then fell all over earth. He tells me this layer was deposited
in one single day. You can find it anywhere on earth, if it has been preserved. The little round
beads are tectites, or shocked glass, of the type you’d find after a nuclear bomb explosion.
This is the signature of the meteorite impact that decimated the dinosaurs.
But that’s not all he brought back from the site. You see, Antoine is a very rare breed of
a paleontologist, he is a paleobotanist that cares about pollen and other microscopic plant fossils.
And while his colleagues spend weeks and months on end and maybe find a single fossil, he just bends
down and picks small pieces of rock, and ends up with 100s of thousands of microscopic fossils.
And from that, he can reconstruct the whole story of what happened. He just dissolves the rock away,
and out come the fossilized grains of pollen. Back under the microscope we go.
This particular slide is from just after the impact.
All I see is weird red shapes, but Antoine sees all kinds of plants.
The round thing in the middle is a grain of pollen,
and the blobs at the bottom left are from an extinct
asparagus.
He can actually tell that the whole place was aquatic world.
Here, he spots spores from an ancient floating fern, still in their protective sac. Next to it
is a piece of burned wood, as the whole forest was of course set ablaze by the impact.
This virus looking pointy thing is actually a floating multicellular algae.
Here is a piece of a 66 million year old leaf.
The coffee bean looking thing is a fossilized pollen from a palm tree.
But the takeaway from this slide, he tells me, is that the diversity is
very reduced from before the impact. These are the few things that actually survived.
He then looks for another sample from before the impact.
Looks the same to me, but he can immediately tell that we are now
in the cretaceous period, the age of the dinosaurs.
It does not take him long to find a grain of pollen with 3 spikes.
This is from one of vast majority of species that didn’t make it.
And unlike his colleagues, he has so many fossils on a slide that he can
just count them and do statistics. And here you can clearly see that
just like the dinosaurs, most plants from the cretaceous just disappeared suddenly.
On the green graph, the dark green represents the percentage of ferns in a slide. And you
can see that they are the ones that made it, and completely dominate at first.
In between the red and the green traces, in black, is the percentage of charcoal particles,
and you can also see that the fires were all over just after the impact.
But eventually other non fern species return (in light green). However the
diversity has been reduced by a huge factor, from 100s of species to maybe 10s of them.
A whole 200 million years of evolution has just been wiped out.
This was humbling. The world is full of talented people which do technical miracles everyday,
and advance scientific knowledge in our world.
Often, nobody knows about them. I’m sure there are plenty of them
in our viewership. It’s nice to be able to give a little shout-out when we can meet one of you.