Word: fractionating
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Using an electronic "dictionary," which it scans in a fraction of a second, the system can figure out how to break almost any word up to and including the 14-syllable supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. It can set type in any one of Time Inc.'s own 127 fonts, tailor-fit copy to a layout, and draw in boxes and assorted lines. Finally, at the rate of a page every 15 seconds, the system can whisk the whole magazine to our printers in Chicago via telephone wires. TIME will soon acquire yet another computerized device-a Videocomp machine that will enable...
...same time at Texas Instruments-the question of priority is still widely debated in the industry-were the natural culmination of a revolution in electronics that began in 1948 with Bell Telephone Laboratories' announcement of the transistor. Small, extremely reliable, and capable of operating with only a fraction of the electricity needed by the vacuum tube, the "solid-state" device proved ideal for making not only inexpensive portable radios and tape recorders but computers as well. Indeed, without the transistor, the computer might never have advanced much beyond the bulky and fickle ENIAC, which was burdened with thousands...
...generation of small, desk-size minicomputers as well as larger, high-speed machines. Their speed resided in the rate at which electric current races through wire: about one foot per billionth of a second, close to the velocity of light. Even so, an electrical pulse required a significant fraction of a second to move through the miles of wiring in the early, large computers. Now even circuitous routes through IC chips could be measured in inches-and traversed by signals in an electronic blink. Computers with ICs not only were faster but were in a sense much smarter. Crammed with...
...mile border with the largest and most powerful English-speaking culture in the world. Says Gérard Pelletier, Canada's Ambassador to Paris and a friend of both Trudeau and Lévesque: "Among Francophone Canadians, wherever they are, only a minute fraction contemplates passively that we might all get assimilated in this great feast of English-speaking North America...
Nevertheless, low-rent water babies need not despair. A drop to popular prices is likely if California hot tubs find a mass market. That's what happened with calculators and waterbeds, both expensive innovations which now sell for a fraction of their original price. Such exotic headaches as cleaning redwood slime out of the water pump and dealing with houseguests who refuse to leave the tub may become staples of cocktail party conversation, if hot tubs can be successfully exported to colder climes than California...