NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/sci/nanotech/794

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-27 | 1.6 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Howard Landman)
Newsgroups: sci.nanotech
Subject: Re: Smart Micromachines
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 27 Jan 93 04:51:47 GMT
Sender: [e-mail]
Organization: HaL Computer Systems, Inc.
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Approved: [e-mail]

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Thomas H. Kunich) writes:
>Since I've worked
>on mechanical computers a good deal I feel that I have some experience that
>would suggest that these things are _not_ practical.

The February issue of Scientific American's cover article is by the folks in
England who actually built Babbage's Difference Engine 2.  About 10,000 parts,
a few bugs in the design that had to be fixed (including a serious problem
with initialization!), but basically, it works as designed.  There were some
very clever ideas to handle things like maximum carry (rolling over from
0,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 to
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) without generating large mechanical
stresses, and they worked even though they had not been built before.

One of their biggest problems was getting 'identical' parts worked to a fine
enough tolerance to actually be interchangeable.  They finally gave up, and
settled for just having the machine work.  With nanotech this shouldn't be a
major problem.  Atoms are very repeatable.

You were saying?

    Howard A. Landman
    [e-mail]