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Actually it's pretty easy to export Martian material to just about anywhere, with the construction of a Martian beanstalk. I did a paper on exporting Martian volatiles (organics, water, etc) this way back in 1991.

As for "otherwise it is boring mineral slag", you're probably right about most of it -- so is most of Earth. But consider that Mars has had large meteor impacts, which can lead to rich deposits of nickel, silver, copper, etc (google sudbury basin). It has also has water and has had extensive volcanism, which implies hydrothermal ore concentration mechanisms (stuff like uranium, among many others).

If anyone cares, the 1986 Byte review of the AT&T Unix PC is also available.

Not quite the historic impact of the Mac, but interesting in its own right. It was certainly the first and may still be the only "Unix PC" ever offered (discounting various Linux offerings and the current MacOS X as "not really UNIX®").

Where did Heinlein ever call it a beanstalk?

I know I've called it that (in a Martian context), although Charles Sheffield (in "Web Between The Worlds", 1979) may have been the first to use that term. I do recall a discussion with Niven about "growing" one to orbit ("a real beanstalk"), but there's nothing that has that kind of compressive strength (needed until the CG reaches synchronous orbit).

AFAIR Heinlein only ever used the concept in one story ("Friday"), and called it a skyhook.

Really, the term "elevator" ought to apply to the thing that rides the cable up and down, and calling something vertical a "bridge" just seems...wrong.

Oh, sure, Devil's Tower is some kind of igneous intrusion. The top was levelled off as a landing zone for UFOs (see CE3K) (grin).

As for volcanic activity on Mars, as the other poster's link points out, Mars has some of the biggest volcanoes in the solar system -- Olympus Mons and the other volcanoes on the Tharsis Bulge. Pavonis Mons is almost exactly on the equator -- if you were going to build a beanstalk on Mars, that'd be the place to anchor it.

Probably not active, though. For that you'd have to go to Io.

They have been around for a very long time. The Sequent Symmetry used 386s running at something like 20MHz in the late 1980s.

That old? :-)

Try the Burroughs B5000 (1961)

Check out Backfire. Sadly, it hasn't been updated in ~2 years though. The idea of that project is to encapsulate the data as movie frames, so it should be possible.

If you search on google around the Groups, this topic appears a few times. I don't know of anyone who has gotten it to work though, and for as many people who question the integrity of data stored on a DV camera, there's just as many who think it would work fine. Maybe if the data was compressed with some sort of error checking/correction beforehand..

Well, if you can get it off of the disk, the source code to FORMAL is available.

Good point. A quick web search will also reveal price comparison sites showing plenty of 12/24Gb DDS3 drives at less than $1000, not the "multi-thousand-dollar" price it says in one of the linked sites (http://www.ajwm.net/backfire/).

People who already have a DV camera may be tempted, but I would worry about reliability of the backups on a device not designed to do the job.

I'll give you your (1) (maybe), but automatic footnoting is hardly a Microsoft innovation. I had it in my FORMAL portable text formatter back in 1979-1980ish, which I believe pre-dates Word 1.0. And I probably cribbed it from Waterloo Script or one of the other text processors around.

As for "Bob", the less said the better :)

Note, this isn't a wordprocessor, but a text formatter like "nroff", or more like IBM's old "script" (which it was cloned from).

(Sorry about the double post, I screwed up the HTML for the link in the previous and Slashdot ate it.)