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It also appears in non-fiction books about this type of problem.

http://www.reviewsonline.com/articles/962097916.htm

I'm suprised at you guys... I'm almost positive that I read about the Matchbox PC on Slashdot many moons ago. Anywho, at 5 cubic inches, the matchbook PC would be smaller than the space cube's 8 cu/in. I would imagine that 8 years is more than enough time to pack even more power into an even smaller PC but, alas, I may be wrong

From http://www.reviewsonline.com/SONY9902.htm

  Sony VAIO Laptop PCG-505TR

Weighing only 3.1 pounds (1.40 kg) and being only 0.9 inch (22.9 mm), the Sony Vaio PCG-505TR combines a 300 MHz Mobile Pentium MMX, 10.4 inch (26.4 cm) active matrix XGA display, 6.4 GB hard drive, 64 Mb SDRAM, double capacity Lithium-Ion battery, V.90 internal modem, iLink (IEEE-1394) interface, USB interface, PC card slot and touch pad with PEN operation in a magnesium alloy case. - WOW!

Thats not "smaller then the MacBook Air" like you said ..
its heaver and MUCH thicker .. Shit .. its as thick as a fucking macbook pro.

Tom Petty, along with other artists like King Crimson and Bela Fleck & The Flecktones, have been responsible for many hours of zoned out internet surfing to some of my favorite sites. You've been there - putting on some tunes, firing up your browser, zoning out and surfing away...
Two minutes later, an hour has passed, the album has ended, and you've been around the world and back and hopefully learned something new.

That's just how I started off the other night. I popped Tom Petty's Wildflowers cd into the drive, cranked up the volume, and fired up the browser. I was immediately sucked in by the sweet acoutic guitar sounds of the title track. Click... Click... Click... You Don't Know How It Feels comes up, I hear the sentimental lyrics, and I drift back to my younger days... Click... Click... Click... Another 30 seconds rolls by and half the album's over... Cabin Down Below just nails me with the big fat Telecasters running through tube amps turned up to 11 sound... Click... Click... Click... I finally make it to Wake Up Time ... "Time to open your eyes... And rise and shine..." and...

I'm accosted by the stench of burning pl

I agree completely.

The only real reason arcades were a hit was because they gave you something that you couldn't get at home. We all had the Atari 2600, right? But it didn't take a genius to figure out that the gameplay was a little different. The 2600 sucked compared to what was in the arcades. So we kept on going.

Now fast-forward to today...is the version of Tekken 3 any different in the arcade as what you have at home?

To get me to an arcade, they're going to have to give me something I can't get at home. A good example of that would be the multiplayer Battlemech Simulators - I'd do that in a heartbeat.

But as for a standup arcade machine - it's a dead genre. A box to waste a little time in a BW-3 while waiting for your hot wings. The arcade culture is gone. Treasure your memories, play MAME...but know that the genie is out of the bottle and playing SOCOM in his living room.

Weaselmancer

I say, add touch sensitivity to an existing laptop design and you have a winner. Make the lid swivel so you can close it with the display on the outside, add some handwriting recognition software and you have effectively a "tablet PC".

Yes it's nice to directly interact with a screen. Back then it seemed like a no-brainer too, so why did the Concerto die a death along with most of the other pen computing platforms? I'm not sure, maybe it just doesn't get integrated into the mainstream so it doesn't ride the price-performance curves as well as a standard laptop. If Wacom Cintiq technology were a cheap $200 upgrade on every monitor I'd spring for it on laptops and even desktops, but clearly most customers don't perceive $200 of value in being able to interact and scribble on a screen. Meanwhile for nearly everything you do on a computer a pointing device and keyboard work just fine.

I worked at GO (later EO) on PenPoint (Byte's Magazine's operating system of the year! :o), and the MS pre-emptive announcement of Windows for Pen Computing was one of several nails in that coffin. (At least PenPoint really went for it with a gestural direct interaction UI, the original and still best implementation of gestures.) It's touching to see several die-hards from those efforts banging their heads against the same wall 10 years later, at least it's at Microsoft's expense.

One of my CS instructers came back from Japan last semester with something similar to this, (scroll down to the bottom, yes it's an old picture, only thing I could find that looked similar), but smaller and faster and without the camera. (It was a Sony though.) It also had a keyboard that you could actually type on, at least a little better than the Vulcan one. Of course, the battery was the same size and weighed more than the rest of the computer.

Gary Trudeau had never used a Newton before doing the comic which he intended to make fun of PDAs in general rather than specifically the Newton. Trudeau was so favorably impressed with the Newton MP120 once he got a chance to use one that he drew this panel to be used as an easter egg in the Newton 2.0 ROMs.

The 2.0 Newton had awesome technology, but it was ahead of its time - nobody really knew what a PDA was for at the time. The MessagePad 2000 was great but cost over $1000 and was the size and weight of a small brick.

Most engineering is incremental development rather than a paradigm shift.

This is true. Microsoft has done some excellent work incrementally improving the Aha! InkWriter technology they bought a decade ago and moving some of its features into the OS. And I hope they keep at it, because there's a lot of improvement still to be made.

Here's a brief review of Bill's talk at Comdex 2000 the last time he made a big deal of Tablet PCs.

Here's a link to a review page of seven different commerical panorama software packages. I'd say IPIX has a bunch of busy lawyers.

"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"