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...

I thought I knew my instruments, I never heard of such a thing. I thought the "scat" part was maybe an error, but it's not.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/f...

Then declare that multiple physical people in a car are actually a corporation, ie, a single legal person.

That's a new one. What does it mean?

Awful lot of probablys in there, friend.