Blinky, your new best friend

I ran across this ad recently for an amazing new product, promoted by my own favorite science fiction author, Isaac Asimov.

Radio Shack’s TRS-80 Pocket Computer turned my dreams into a reality. Now I can take the power of a true computer with me wherever I go.
— Isaac Asimov

The marketing guys chime in a few paragraphs later.

And it can also function just like a calculator — something a desktop computer can’t do.
— Radio Shack

Wait, what!? With a standard calculator included in just about every phone that I can think of, it is hard to imagine a desktop computer ever existing without that ability. Crazy, right? Now that I think of it, it wasn’t too far in the distant past that desktop computers couldn’t be used for voice communications, something a simple phone could do. So what does $169.95 actually get you?

From Dave Dunfield’s old computer page:

The machine was actually a Radio Shack branded version of the Sharp PC-1211, which features:

• Sharp SC43177/SC43178 4-bit CPU running at 256khz
• 1×24 character LCD display
• 57 key “Qwerty” keyboard
• 1.5k of RAM for user program storage
• Pizoelectric buzzer

Be sure to check out the full breakdown at Dave’s TRS-80 Pocket Computer page

As a point of comparison, here are a few highlights of Motorola’s Droid 2 tech specs:

• 1 GHz processor
• 480×854 Pixel display (Characters displayed depends on the font)
• QWERTY keyboard
• 8GB flash (expandable to 32GB)
• Support for stereo bluetooth (not sure if actual speaker is stereo or not)
• 100’s of other features like camera, video capture, streaming video, and get this includes the ability to make phone calls. Sadly though, it can’t make you breakfast… yet.

Let me whip out my calculator on my i7 Desktop Computer! The Droid 2 has a 3,906.25 times faster processor (just based on clock rate, not actual computational power) and has 5,592,405.33 times more storage. That seems crazy right? The TRS-80 pocket computer came out in 1980, about 20 years ago. I wonder how people will feel about our state of the art smartphones in 2020? That is assuming we haven’t been taken over by robots gone wild, destroyed ourselves with nukes, or succumbed to a raging nano-plague. But that is all just science fiction.

Isaac Asimov promotes Radio Shack's TRS-80 Pocket Computer

I just ran across a cool video of a flying robot playing Jingle Bells on an electric piano. The tempo seemed a bit off, so I clicked through to YouTube to see if there were any more videos. A link for how it works popped up, so naturally I clicked it. Base off of the video, it looks like a human was controlling the robot, so not as impressive as I initially thought. They show some background on “co-pilot” routines that assist the human controllers to keep them from making mistakes. I find this interesting because eventually with AI, these little machines could be completely automated. This reminds me of the creepy surveillance robots from Dark Angel. With special routines to keep these from bumping into obstacles, I can definitely see them flying around our cities sometime in the near future. If you want to see the Jingle Bells video, click through the via link at the bottom. I found this video more interesting though.

via Geekologie