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"There was a time when one old eccentric guy with a notebook could do something important to science. Now even the resources of a major university are often not enough."
- Jerry Pournelle
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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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'I guess there's nobody round this table who doesn't have a Crosswell [tapeworm] working for him in the small intestine.'
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'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
'...for months Grantline bores had dug into the cliff.'
'I hope all those other cars are on automatic,' he said anxiously.
'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
