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Personal Machines and Portable Worlds
A lifelong fascination with technology begins with a single object. Think back to when you were a child, to when you first encountered something
He recalled that, though it looked cool and could run games and play music, the feature that astounded him was that it essentially generated a local social network, allowing users to wirelessly chat with one another at a range of up to 100 meters. Later, in the same post, Chayka writes of the Palm Pilot — an early attempt at portable computing — that, despite it not providing much in the way of “fun” features for a kid, there was still an “ineffable appeal to holding a gateway to a digital world in your hand.” Mine have to be standard among people of a certain age: the communicator used in the original series of Star Trek(its gold mesh exterior always intrigued me, not to mention the sound it made when flipped open), or the tricorders and PADDs of The Next Generation.
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