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"None of us, no matter what continent or island or ice cap, asked to be born in the first place, and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80, only just got here."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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| Sandbenders | ||
| A highly customized computer system; the opposite of a box from Gateway or Dell. |
Gibson's characters, the ones who are most interesting, always express themselves with interesting artifacts. The Sandbenders are a colony in Oregon; they make one-of-a-kind artifacts that are exactly the opposite of the computers to which we're all accustomed.
| "I like your computer," she said. "It looks like it was made by Indians or something." Chia looked down at her sandbenders. Turned off the red switch. "Coral," she said. "These are turquoise. The ones that look like ivory are the inside of a kind of nut. Renewable." "The rest is silver?" "Aluminum," Chia said. "They melt old cans they dig up on the beach cast it in sand molds. These panels are micarta. That's linen with this resin in it." |
| Technovelgy from Idoru,
by William Gibson. Published by Putnam in 1996 Additional resources -
|
Not even on Ebay. The Jargon File also notes that a sandbender is a person who works in the area of silicon lithography and the physical design of a computer integrated circuit chips. Silicon, of course, is what sand is mostly made of.
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Sandbenders-related
news articles:
- Calling All Sandbenders - PC Case Mod Contest!
| Is Agentic AI The Wrong Kind Of Smartness? |
| Jetson Orin Nano Super 70 Just $249 |
| Automatic Bot Traffic Is 38 Percent Of HTTP Requests |
| Neuroplatform Human Brain Organoid Bioprocessor Uses Less Electricity |
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'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.'
'Gaines and Harvey mounted tumblebugs, and kept abreast of the Cadet Captain...'
