Richard Feynman’s 1959 lecture “There’s plenty of room at the bottom” envisioned atomic pick and place to build complex nanoscale machines. The lecture is often considered the conceptual birth of nanotechnology.

I am sure this is not the first time conductive AFM has been used to achieve nanoscale patterning to build a useful piece of tech, but very cool nonetheless.

https://web.pa.msu.edu/people/yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf