When so-called “minicomputers” first appeared in the 1970s, they supplanted mainframes on a scale of size and cost expressed by Bell’s Law, which holds that a new class of smaller, cheaper computers comes along roughly every 10 years. Personal computers, notebooks, smartphones, and tablets followed, and the latest entry — a millimeter-scale computerized eye pressure monitor — was displayed last month at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.
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Beyond Mobile: A Computer the Size of a Grain of Sand
Posted by: Mike Martin March 23, 2011 05:00 AMWhen so-called “minicomputers” first appeared in the 1970s, they supplanted mainframes on a scale of size and cost expressed by Bell’s Law, which holds that a new class of smaller, cheaper computers comes along roughly every 10 years. Personal computers, notebooks, smartphones, and tablets followed, and the latest entry — a millimeter-scale computerized eye pressure monitor — was displayed last month at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.