“MT4C1024-HD” by ZeptoBars – http://zeptobars.ru/en/read/how-to-open-microchip-asic-what-inside. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MT4C1024-HD.jpg#/media/File:MT4C1024-HD.jpg

When you buy and use a USB thumb drive, as they’re called, do you wonder what’s inside that bit of plastic?

Above is a 1 megabit (approx.) Large Scale Integrated Circuit (LSIC) containg many individual memory chips to make up the 1 MB of Random Access Memory (RAM). Notice that it’s four rows of eight squares. We tend to think in terms of powers of two, and eight is a good number.

I find these images beautiful:

This one is the printed circuit board layout which holds the ICs and all the associated circuit components. Look at the beautiful complexity! Human hands did this. Computer software plays a bug part in laying it out, but a human wrote that software anyway.