Steampunk chip takes the heat
Found on New Scientist on Thursday, 09 September 2010
A DARPA-funded project has reinvented a type of logic gate in the style of Victorian inventor Charles Babbage - not for aesthetic reasons, but because the retro device works at temperatures too high for conventional transistors.
Babbage famously designed mechanical computers through which data would circulate as steam-driven pistons turned cogs and levers.
Steampunk comes back and I can't wait for it. One has to love the times when you could fix your computer with a hammer and screwdriver.