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"...science fiction is sort of like a sociological genome. It's a huge range of possible futures, most of them useless; some vital. You never really know in advance."
- Peter Watts
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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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Science Fiction
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'He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors...'
'The robant and the tiny old woman entered the control room slowly...'
'Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs... What are the odds?'
'It is as you thought when you constructed the time crystal, my master Vaylan.'
'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
