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The Netherlands' Tech Industry: Philips, ASML, and the Chokepoint

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The Netherlands produced two of the most consequential technology companies in history from a country of 17 million people, separated by fifty years and a complete transformation in what “technology company” meant. Philips, founded in 1891, invented or commercialized the compact cassette tape, the CD, the DVD, and the optical disc ecosystem that defined consumer media for four decades. ASML, spun out of Philips in 1984, became the sole manufacturer of extreme ultraviolet lithography machines — the equipment without which no chip smaller than 7nm can be produced. Every advanced semiconductor in every iPhone, every data center GPU, every AI accelerator passes through a machine only ASML can make. Between these two companies, the Netherlands shaped more of the physical infrastructure of the digital world than any country its size has a right to claim. It also produced Edsger Dijkstra, one of the greatest computer scientists of the twentieth century, and the programming language Python.

Philips and the Century of Consumer Electronics

Gerard Philips and his father Frederik founded Philips & Co. in Eindhoven in 1891 to manufacture incandescent light bulbs under Edison’s patents. The company grew into electrical equipment, then radio components, then consumer electronics — following the successive waves of electrification and broadcast media with the adaptability of a company that understood electrical engineering as its core competence, not any specific product category.

Philips’s contributions to consumer media technology were foundational:

The compact cassette tape, introduced in 1963, was developed at Philips’s research laboratories in Eindhoven. Philips made the deliberate decision to license the format to other manufacturers at no charge — prioritizing standard adoption over monopoly profit. The cassette became the dominant portable music format for twenty years, enabling the Sony Walkman and the mixtape culture of the 1970s and 1980s.

The Compact Disc, developed jointly by Philips and Sony and released in 1982, replaced vinyl records and cassettes as the dominant music format. The physical specifications — 12cm diameter, 1.2mm polycarbonate disc, 780nm laser wavelength — were standardized through a negotiation between Philips and Sony in which Philips’s original proposal for a 115-minute capacity disc was modified to 74 minutes (allegedly to accommodate Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony). The CD’s digital audio format established the principle that recorded music was data — a principle with implications that the music industry spent the next thirty years failing to internalize.

DVD (Digital Versatile Disc, 1995) extended the CD format to video. Blu-ray (2006) extended it further.

Philips also developed or commercialized the V2000 home video format (which lost to VHS in the format war), the LaserDisc, and numerous display technologies including work on LCD development. The company’s research laboratories — Philips Research, later NXP and NXP Semiconductors — produced fundamental work in semiconductor physics and materials science.

By the 2010s, Philips had divested its consumer electronics division, its semiconductor division (which became NXP Semiconductors, a major automotive chip supplier), and its lighting division, to focus on healthcare technology. The Philips brand that had defined European consumer electronics for a century was reduced to a licensing arrangement on televisions built by others.

Edsger Dijkstra: Clarity as a Weapon

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was born in Rotterdam in 1930 and became, over the following six decades, one of the most influential and deliberately provocative figures in computer science.

Dijkstra’s technical contributions were fundamental. His shortest path algorithm — Dijkstra’s algorithm, published in 1959 — solved the problem of finding the minimum-cost path between nodes in a weighted graph in polynomial time, and remains in daily use in GPS navigation, network routing protocols, and logistics optimization. His work on concurrent programming and the semaphore primitive (1965) provided the conceptual tools for managing shared resources in multi-process systems. His design of the THE multiprogramming system at the Technische Hogeschool Eindhoven (1968) introduced hierarchical system design and formal verification of operating system correctness.

His most culturally influential contribution was a 1968 letter to Communications of the ACM: “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” — a concise argument that the unconditional jump (goto) was destructive to program clarity and correctness, and should be eliminated from high-level languages. The letter, which Dijkstra did not choose the title of (editor Niklaus Wirth wrote it), launched the structured programming movement and contributed to the eventual disappearance of goto from modern programming practice.

Dijkstra wrote his papers, notes, and lectures by hand — he never used a word processor — and distributed them as EWDs (Edsger W. Dijkstra documents), numbered sequentially from EWD001 (1959) to EWD1318 (2002). The EWD archive, now digitized by the University of Texas at Austin where Dijkstra spent his final years, is one of the most remarkable collections of scientific writing in computer science: precise, occasionally acerbic, and consistently aimed at clarity as a moral as well as technical virtue.

“Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes” is the aphorism most often hung on Dijkstra — and it does capture his view that computing was fundamentally mathematics, not engineering. The attribution is almost certainly wrong, however: the line has no source in Dijkstra’s own writings, and quotation researchers trace its popular form to Michael Fellows and Ian Parberry in the early 1990s. Dijkstra expressed the same conviction in his own words many times; this particular sentence just was not one of them.

Python: Guido van Rossum and CWI Amsterdam

On December 26, 1989, Guido van Rossum began writing a programming language as a Christmas holiday project. Van Rossum worked at CWI (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science) in Amsterdam, where he had contributed to the ABC language — a teaching language designed to be simple and readable. ABC had good ideas but limited adoption; Van Rossum wanted to create something that combined ABC’s readability with Unix shell scripting’s practical utility and a richer standard library.

Python 0.9.0 was released in February 1991, with features that defined the language’s character: indentation-as-syntax (replacing explicit block delimiters), a clean object model, dynamic typing, and a “batteries included” standard library philosophy. Van Rossum made Python open-source from the start and developed it through a community process — the Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) system — that allowed structured contributions while maintaining a coherent design direction.

Python’s trajectory from hobbyist creation to the most widely used programming language in the world took three decades and several pivots. Web development (Django, Flask) established it as a practical production tool. Scientific computing (NumPy, SciPy) established it in academia. The rise of machine learning — and specifically the adoption of Python by Google Brain, which built TensorFlow with Python bindings, and by the deep learning community broadly — made Python the de facto language of artificial intelligence. By 2023, Python was the most popular programming language in multiple indices, used by approximately 49% of developers worldwide.

ASML: The Most Critical Company You’ve Never Heard Of

ASML was founded in 1984 as a joint venture between ASM International (a Dutch semiconductor equipment company) and Philips, established in a temporary building in the parking lot of Philips’s Eindhoven headquarters. Its initial product was a step-and-repeat lithography machine — equipment that projected circuit patterns onto silicon wafers using ultraviolet light, enabling the manufacturing of integrated circuits.

Lithography is the fundamental process of semiconductor manufacturing: the feature size that a lithography machine can resolve determines the minimum size of transistors that can be printed on a wafer, which determines the density and performance of the resulting chips. Moore’s Law — the observed doubling of transistor density roughly every two years — was physically enabled by successive improvements in lithography equipment.

ASML’s competitive advantage was not immediately obvious. In the 1980s and 1990s, it competed with Nikon and Canon (Japan) for the lithography equipment market. It won through a combination of technical innovation, a more open partnership model with customers and suppliers, and — crucially — the decision to invest in Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography when conventional UV lithography approached its physical limits.

EUV lithography uses light at 13.5nm wavelength — roughly 60 times shorter than conventional deep UV — to print features smaller than 7nm. The engineering challenges were extraordinary: 13.5nm photons are absorbed by virtually all materials, including air, so EUV machines must operate in near-vacuum. The light source requires firing high-powered carbon dioxide lasers at tin droplets at 50,000 droplets per second to produce a plasma that emits EUV light. The mirrors that direct the light must be polished to atomic-scale smoothness. An EUV machine contains over 100,000 components, requires dozens of specialized suppliers, and costs approximately $200 million.

No other company in the world manufactures EUV lithography machines. ASML invested in EUV development for twenty years before commercial deployment — a period in which competitors concluded the technology was not feasible and stopped investing. When TSMC, Intel, and Samsung needed EUV machines for their 7nm and below processes beginning around 2019, there was only one supplier.

ASML’s Strategic Position

ASML’s monopoly on EUV lithography makes it the most critical chokepoint in global semiconductor manufacturing. The US government’s October 2022 export controls on advanced semiconductor equipment to China specifically targeted EUV machines — ASML was already prohibited from selling EUV to Chinese customers, and the 2023 Dutch government controls extended restrictions to certain deep-UV systems as well. A company with fewer than 40,000 employees in Eindhoven has become central to US-China technology competition.

ASML’s 2023 revenue was €27.6 billion, with a gross margin exceeding 50%. Its market capitalization reached €300 billion — making it one of Europe’s most valuable companies. It is also, outside the semiconductor industry, almost entirely unknown to the general public: the ultimate B2B company, selling machines that make the machines that make the devices that everyone uses.

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