Modern Adaptations
While the abacus and mechanical calculator have been replaced by electronic calculators using microchips, the recent advances in MEMs and nanotechnology have led to recent high-tech experiments in mechanical computation. The benefits suggested include operation in high radiation or high temperature environments. These modern versions of mechanical computation were highlighted in the magazine The Economist in its special "end of the millennium" black cover issue in an article entitled "Babbage's Last Laugh".
Read more about this topic: Charles Babbage
Famous quotes containing the word modern:
“The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied ... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)