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"The point sticks in your head: physics rules. Virtue does not triumph unless the physics allows it."
- Larry Niven
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| Self-Maintaining Circuit Monitoring and Repair | ||
| A computer that monitors itself for repair. |
| Stranton put down his pencil, wadded up a sheaf of scratch papers, and began telling himself that it was time to go home. The others had long since checked out, leaving him to toy with The Gimmick. The Gimmick was the pet name given to a special engineering problem which one or another of his staff — and a great many other staffs — had pondered hopelessly for years. The problem was to design a practical, self-maintaining circuit monitoring and repairing device which, when installed in a computer bank, would solve the incredibly complex maintenance problems of such instruments. Well, thought Stranton rising from his drawing desk, there’s no hurry. Human labor is going to be cheap enough for a good many years yet to make the enormously expensive Gimmick a purely academic study. |
| Technovelgy from Gramp and his Dog,
by Frank Quattrocchi. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1952 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the repair robots from The Well-Oiled Machine (1950) by H.B. Fyfe, the self-repairing robot from Accidental Flight (1952) by W.F. Wallace, the blue collar robot from The Velvet Glove (1956) by Harry Harrison, the service drones from The Two Faces of Tomorrow (1979) by James P. Hogan and the repair drone from Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson.
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'The actuating mechanism that should have operated by the imprint of her image on the telephoto cell...'
'The only real cost was in the plastic balloon that guided the growth of the coral and enclosed the coral's special air-borne food.'
'The border was defended by... a swarm of quasi-independent aerostats.'
'The pitiless M rays pierced Earth and steel and densest concrete as if they were so much transparent glass...'
'Pina2bo would have to operate full blast for many years to put as much SO2 into the stratosphere as its namesake had done in a few minutes.'
'Nanny is different,' Tom Fields murmured... 'she's not like a machine. She's like a person.'
'We made a crude , small cell and were delighted - and, I admit, somewhat surprised - to find it worked.'
'...we've promised him a generous pension from the royalties.'
'The clothes and jewelery drew their tiny power requirements from her movements.'
'At the end of each appendage's eight fingers there are tinier appendages...'
