History

The hardware development stories are a first-class pillar, not colour. The readable history of this industry has largely not been written in one place: the Intel 1103 through to HBM4; the Qimonda collapse and what became of its patent estate; how Rambus litigation shaped the DDR standards; consolidation from a dozen DRAM makers to three; the 2002–2006 price-fixing prosecutions; the cost of the EUV transition.

This material has a useful property. It is sourced, specific and human — court records, oral histories, patent filings, SEC filings — which means a language model cannot fabricate it convincingly. That is a feature, not an inconvenience. Where the rest of the project guards against invented numbers, this pillar is naturally resistant to invention, and the sources are unusually rich: discovery and plea agreements put internal industry documents into the public record that no vendor would ever publish.

Seeded so far, on the timeline: the one-transistor cell patent and Dennard’s own account of it, and the DRAM price-fixing prosecution.