Duracells are notorious for poor quality. Avoid at all costs, they are garbage now. I try to use low self-discharge NiMH for standby electronics. Even if they go flat, they don't leak IME, I guess they're still at a price point were the manufacturer can put in the right ingredients.

1960s sci-fi was Moon bases and interstellar travel. Time lapse photography with a complex electronic timer instead of a mechanical clock is disappointing by comparison.

Digital! When arbitrary precision is mistaken for accuracy!

As a (mostly) PCB designer, I find these TAB (tape automated bonding) attachments to the panel to be fascinating. The chips are the column and row drivers, that is, these chips have the job to drive the gates of the transistors that control each and every sub-pixel on the panel.
So your typical 1920x1080 LCD panel has 1920x3=5760 columns to drive. That's R G and B for every pixel. There are 10 such chips arranged along the top of the panel, which means each chip (about 10x3mm) has to have 576 analog outputs driven from the RSDS digital bus, itself generated from the TCON (timing controller) which receives the video in whatever format and translates it to the particular panel's needs (ie, bit depth, refresh type, etc).
Oh yeah, each LCD shutter must never have a DC potential on it for too long, so on each alternate cycle the polarity of the control signal is inverted.
This has something to do with the crystals themselves becoming "denatured" if they're in the same position too long.
Not only that, but the gate drive is non-linear and the column driver has to compensate for that, of course each type of compensation depends on the exact chemistry of the crystals used.
Anyways, if you look at the little PCB it's 1 mil thick (~0.025mm), and has hundreds of traces packed into a few mm... Not to mention the hundreds of contacts on the chip, all perfectly aligned to the PCB.

Ever wonder how the distance between the front and back panels is kept so uniform across the panel?
There's thousands of tiny ceramic beads in the panel to maintain the precise separation ...
Ahhhh yeah, this stuff is cool, amazing what we can afford to make and throw out if it doesn't work.

Awesome. Every once in a while I get exposed to something totally new, at my age that's quite a feat. I'll have to check out these two books.

What do you think was limiting it? You think someone who wants to design a (say) 15GHz sampling oscilloscope will stop because of the Arduino?

On the other hand, why not use an Arduino? I don't need a 32 bit monster "micro" controller running embedded Linux to flash the headlights on my RC car. I use a bare-bones PIC but someone who is happy with the "get it done" approach of an Arduino, what is wrong with that?

If you mean turn from the 19th to the 20th, that's really showing your age!

Showing my age here, Kano was the name of the computer operator dude in Space: 1999.

One presumes you pick up the phone in the middle there...

I think WWII never happened. You have proof that half the world fought each other with jet engines and nuclear bombs when ten years prior most people didn't even have running water or electricity in their homes and still used horse?

You mean we'll finally see the day of the nanotechnological assembler? Will we finally get to the leisure, post-scarcity society? Will we get rid of the 40 hour work week and 95% employment when most jobs are just performance art?

When I was a kid my parents had a collection of very old Britannica supplements from the 1960s. Some sort of yearly book for each year after the main books came out.

Anyways, when I was a kid I was always impressed by the pictures and the descriptions. One of the articles was about fluidics, the pictures of plates of metal with holes, piled up and bolted together and doing logic operations with boiling liquids and what not.

I'm just wool gathering, but it seems like the 1960s were unusually fertile in all fields and it's fun to see one of these "anything goes"-type technologies still being useful after so long.

Never mind all that, who's the gorgeous woman on Cringely's page?

Look's like apostrophe's figured out how to make other apostrophe's.

Just calling it the RapidScatt would have prevented that unfortunate association... I got it wrong, it is called a scaterrometer, two r...