Word: making
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...miniaturization of technology, having made extraordinary progress in the 40 years since the invention of the transistor, is about to make another shrinking leap. Adapting the chipmaking equipment used to squeeze millions of electrical circuits onto slivers of silicon, researchers are creating a lilliputian tool chest of tiny moving parts: valves, gears, springs, levers, lenses and ball bearings. One team at the University of California, Berkeley, has already built a silicon motor not much wider than an eyelash that can rotate 500 times a minute...
...these breakthrough products look hopelessly oversize. Last month Compaq unveiled a 2.2-kg (6-lb.) full-powered portable computer that fits in a briefcase. Sharp and Poqet make even smaller models that slip into a suit pocket. Today there are fax machines, radar detectors, electronic dictionaries, cellular telephones, color televisions, even videotape recorders that fit comfortably in the palm of a hand...
With the advent of silicon gears, springs and cantilevers, machines will become smaller still. These miniature moving parts can be etched on silicon using a variation on the photolithographic technique used to make computer chips. To build a tiny rotating arm, for example, layers of polysilicon and a type of glass that can be removed with acid are deposited on a silicon base. A hole for the hub is lined with the glass and then filled with polysilicon. When the glass is etched away, the hub remains and the arm is free to spin around its axis...
...summer long John Kennedy had brooded, waiting for Nikita Khrushchev to make good on his threat to get rid of "the bone in my throat" -- partitioned Berlin. But he had not anticipated what would happen on that warm August afternoon in 1961 when he set out from Hyannis Port, Mass., on the yacht Marlin loaded with family and his favorite picnic dish, fish chowder...
...Royal Canadian Mounted Police are a much loved national symbol. But a proposal by R.C.M.P. Commissioner Norman Inkster to make their trademark flat- brimmed dress hat optional for Sikh recruits, whose religion demands they wear turbans, is pitting traditionalists against civil rights advocates and the immigrant community...