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The Rise and Fall of 3M’s Floppy Disk

Cars That Think

Audio Magazine/Internet Archive /Scotch As Smithsonian Magazine notes , the formulation he developed, combining cabinetmaker’s glue with glycerin, proved to be just the right level of easy-to-remove adhesive that it became an out-and-out phenomenon. I bought them from a junk store, and maybe paid $2 for them.

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One Way to Stop the Social Spread of Disinformation

Cars That Think

A decentralized cloud would minimize the need to use third-party services to manage and store data on people and business enterprises. The HEC can allow consumers to better control how their data is stored, shared, and monetized, Alamouti says. Alamouti, cofounder and executive board chairman of Mimik , in Oakland, Calif.,

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Inventing Postscript, the Tech That Took the Pain out of Printing

Cars That Think

The time was right because of the imminence of three hardware developments: the first low-cost, bit-mapped personal computer, the first low-cost laser printer, and a decline in price of high-density memory chips. Such an architecture stores data as it is received, stacking it like a pile of books.

Design 106
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SwRI to showcase Ranger precision localization technology for automated driving; non-GPS system with 2cm precision

Green Car Congress

We have made this technology smaller, faster, and more robust for real-world use at a relatively low cost. Ranger images the unique “fingerprint” of road surfaces by matching thousands of distinguishing ground features, such as aggregate, cracks and road markings, to corresponding features collected and stored in a map.

2016 150
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How the Graphical User Interface Was Invented

Cars That Think

In 1984, the low-cost Macintosh from Apple Computer Inc., The BitBlt software enabled application programs to mix and manipulate rectangular arrays of pixel values in on-screen or off-screen memory, or between the two, combining the pixel values and storing the result in the appropriate bit-map location. Cupertino, Calif.,

Design 144
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Designing the First Apple Macintosh: The Engineers’ Story

Cars That Think

make a low-cost “appliance”-type computer that would be as easy to use as a toaster. Generally, a multitasking operating system tracks the progress of each of the programs it is running and then stores the entire state of each program—the values of its variables, the location of the program counter, and so on.

Design 119
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Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story

Cars That Think

When the design of the Commodore 64 began, the overriding goals were simplicity and low cost. The initial production cost of the Commodore 64 was targeted at $130; it turned out to be $135. Computer magazines such as Creative Computing and Compute! review software and publish programs that run on the C-64.

Engine 118