Witness the miracles of the technological revolution. Today, robots do jobs too dangerous for humans, and computers help the disabled to walk again. At the heart of this new technological era is a miniature miracle - the computer chip. It is a tiny, highly processed sliver of silicon with thousands of transistors crowded onto its surface. This power-packed chip, coupled with human ingenuity, is the key to the amazing inventions examined in MINIATURE MIRACLE: THE COMPUTER CHIP.
Amazon.com
Originally released in the mid-1980s, Miniature Miracle takes us back to a time when computers were just a peripheral element of everyday life. While classrooms were beginning to use simple computer programs as teaching tools, the heavy-duty work was still conducted almost exclusively by programmers at research institutions. The focus of the film is not really the computer chip itself (as the title suggests), but its early applications in the realms of science and art: robots designed to assist people with physical disabilities, specialized suits created to record and reproduce every nuance of human motion, and complex three-dimensional images built from simple black-and-white graphs. The human brain is touted by the filmmakers as the rough equivalent of all the computers in the world connected to each other, sending and receiving thousands of signals simultaneously. By that definition, we may not be too far from a hostile takeover by our laptops. --Claire Campbell
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