The Pit Viper (Darkfield)

The Pit Viper (Darkfield)

This striking pose of a pit viper was found on a pad surrounding the Viper logo mixed within the integrated circuitry of an early 1990s vintage Hewlett-Packard memory controller chip. The designers' initials (all 20 of them) were discovered stacked together on a pad not far from the snake. This chip was introduced in the first of a line of HP workstations termed "Snakes" that were popular in 1991-1992. The microprocessor was code named the "Mustang" before the Snake name was adopted for this series of computers. This chip is also the one with the warning: You are too Close!

View this silicon artwork under differential interference contrast and brightfield illumination.


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