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Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up!
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To: Michael Greene who wrote (653)3/11/1997 1:45:00 AM
From: Snowshoe   of 10309
 
>>Mark Weiser...father of ubiquitous computing<<

For those who wish to read further material from Mark Weiser, here is a worthwhile article: ubiq.com

He makes the following point concerning the way technology disappears into the background when it becomes ubiquitous:

"How do technologies disappear into the background? The vanishing of electric motors may serve as an instructive example: At
the turn of the century, a typical workshop or factory contained a single engine that drove dozens or hundreds of different machines through a system of shafts and pulleys. Cheap, small, efficient electric motors made it possible first to give each machine or tool its own source of motive force, then to put many motors into a single machine.

A glance through the shop manual of a typical automobile, for example, reveals twenty-two motors and twenty-five more solenoids. They start the engine, clean the windshield, lock and unlock the doors, and so on. By paying careful attention it might be possible to know whenever one activated a motor, but there would be no point to it."

The above passage brought back for me a boyhood tour of an abandoned turn-of-the-century wagon-maker's shop that had belonged to a friend's grandfather. All the machinery was driven by leather belts taking off from a series of rotating driveshafts that were in turn driven from a central electric motor powered from generators at the nearby millpond.

-Greg
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