This week in TechWatch
- PRE-CES GADGET FEST:
Where do we go from here?
- DO YOU REALLY NEED THIS?
Spring Design sues B&N
Imagination’s Sensia
- THE SOCIAL NETWORK:
Facebook and friends shoot the moon
Michael Arrington raises hell
- GRAPHICALLY SPEAKING:
S3’s Graphics 5400E
- THE FINANCIAL PAGE:
Great quarter for Nvidia
Silicon Image clicks
- NEWS WATCH:
MIPS rolls out new cores
IBM passes PLM to Dassault
- THE INDUSTRY INSIDER:
Stuff ... we want it all and in a flash
Techwatch November 9th 2009
We are so enamored with our multifunction mobile phone, and our multifunction PC—devices that promise us the world at our fingertips—that we may have forgotten, those of us that ever even knew, about the machines that got us here. The Jacquard loom comes to mind as an early single-function machine, and I’ve commented on that before. But the idea of having all the world’s knowledge available to you, your own library of Alexander, was first attempted by Ephraim Chambers in London in 1728, when he published his two-volume Cyclopaedia, which was the forerunner to the modern encyclopedia developed by Diderot in France (which actually started as a translation of Chamber’s work). H.G. Wells, the author of such famous works as The Time Machine, and War of the Worlds, as well as The Outline of History, envisioned a huge worldwide networked library he called the “World Brain.” The networking was the weak link in the concept and it never got funded, but the idea was fascinating and persisted. Single-function analog electronic computers were developed in the 1900’s, one of the first being Arthur Pollen’s electrically driven mechanical analog computer for fire-control systems, based on James Thompson’s differential analyzer of 1876. …
