Computed·Blg

Via Venture Beat

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IBM has been shipping computers for more than 65 years, and it is finally on the verge of creating a true electronic brain.

Big Blue is announcing today that it, along with four universities and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), have created the basic design of an experimental computer chip that emulates the way the brain processes information.

IBM’s so-called cognitive computing chips could one day simulate and emulate the brain’s ability to sense, perceive, interact and recognize — all tasks that humans can currently do much better than computers can.

Dharmendra Modha (pictured below right) is the principal investigator of the DARPA project, called Synapse (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics, or SyNAPSE). He is also a researcher at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif.

“This is the seed for a new generation of computers, using a combination of supercomputing, neuroscience, and nanotechnology,” Modha said in an interview with VentureBeat. ”The computers we have today are more like calculators. We want to make something like the brain. It is a sharp departure from the past.”

If it eventually leads to commercial brain-like chips, the project could turn computing on its head, overturning the conventional style of computing that has ruled since the dawn of the information age and replacing it with something that is much more like a thinking artificial brain. The eventual applications could have a huge impact on business, science and government. The idea is to create computers that are better at handling real-world sensory problems than today’s computers can. IBM could also build a better Watson, the computer that became the world champion at the game show Jeopardy earlier this year.

We wrote about the project when IBM announced the project in November, 2008 and again when it hit its first milestone in November, 2009. Now the researchers have completed phase one of the project, which was to design a fundamental computing unit that could be replicated over and over to form the building blocks of an actual brain-like computer.

Richard Doherty, an analyst at the Envisioneering Group, has been briefed on the project and he said there is “nothing even close” to the level of sophistication in cognitive computing as this project.

This new computing unit, or core, is analogous to the brain. It has “neurons,” or digital processors that compute information. It has “synapses” which are the foundation of learning and memory. And it has “axons,” or data pathways that connect the tissue of the computer.

While it sounds simple enough, the computing unit is radically different from the way most computers operate today. Modern computers are based on the von Neumann architecture, named after computing pioneer John von Neumann and his work from the 1940s.

In von Neumann machines, memory and processor are separated and linked via a data pathway known as a bus. Over the past 65 years, von Neumann machines have gotten faster by sending more and more data at higher speeds across the bus, as processor and memory interact. But the speed of a computer is often limited by the capacity of that bus, leading some computer scientists to call it the “von Neumann bottleneck.”

With the human brain, the memory is located with the processor (at least, that’s how it appears, based on our current understanding of what is admittedly a still-mysterious three pounds of meat in our heads).

The brain-like processors with integrated memory don’t operate fast at all, sending data at a mere 10 hertz, or far slower than the 5 gigahertz computer processors of today. But the human brain does an awful lot of work in parallel, sending signals out in all directions and getting the brain’s neurons to work simultaneously. Because the brain has more than 10 billion neuron and 10 trillion connections (synapses) between those neurons, that amounts to an enormous amount of computing power.

IBM wants to emulate that architecture with its new chips.

“We are now doing a new architecture,” Modha said. “It departs from von Neumann in variety of ways.”

The research team has built its first brain-like computing units, with 256 neurons, an array of 256 by 256 (or a total of 65,536) synapses, and 256 axons. (A second chip had 262,144 synapses) In other words, it has the basic building block of processor, memory, and communications. This unit, or core, can be built with just a few million transistors (some of today’s fastest microchips can be built with billions of transistors).

Modha said that this new kind of computing will likely complement, rather than replace, von Neumann machines, which have become good at solving problems involving math, serial processing, and business computations. The disadvantage is that those machines aren’t scaling up to handle big problems well any more. They are using too much power and are harder to program.

The more powerful a computer gets, the more power it consumes, and manufacturing requires extremely precise and expensive technologies. And the more components are crammed together onto a single chip, the more they “leak” power, even in stand-by mode. So they are not so easily turned off to save power.

The advantage of the human brain is that it operates on very low power and it can essentially turn off parts of the brain when they aren’t in use.

These new chips won’t be programmed in the traditional way. Cognitive computers are expected to learn through experiences, find correlations, create hypotheses, remember, and learn from the outcomes. They mimic the brain’s “structural and synaptic plasticity.” The processing is distributed and parallel, not centralized and serial.

With no set programming, the computing cores that the researchers have built can mimic the event-driven brain, which wakes up to perform a task.

Modha said the cognitive chips could get by with far less power consumption than conventional chips.

The so-called “neurosynaptic computing chips” recreate a phenomenon known in the brain as a “spiking” between neurons and synapses. The system can handle complex tasks such as playing a game of Pong, the original computer game from Atari, Modha said.

Two prototype chips have already been fabricated and are being tested. Now the researchers are about to embark on phase two, where they will build a computer. The goal is to create a computer that not only analyzes complex information from multiple senses at once, but also dynamically rewires itself as it interacts with the environment, learning from what happens around it.

The chips themselves have no actual biological pieces. They are fabricated from digital silicon circuits that are inspired by neurobiology. The technology uses 45-nanometer silicon-on-insulator complementary metal oxide semiconductors. In other words, it uses a very conventional chip manufacturing process. One of the cores contains 262,144 programmable synapses, while the other contains 65,536 learning synapses.

Besides playing Pong, the IBM team has tested the chip on solving problems related to navigation, machine vision, pattern recognition, associative memory (where you remember one thing that goes with another thing) and classification.

Eventually, IBM will combine the cores into a full integrated system of hardware and software. IBM wants to build a computer with 10 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses, Modha said. That’s as powerful than the human brain. The complete system will consume one kilowatt of power and will occupy less than two liters of volume (the size of our brains), Modha predicts. By comparison, today’s fastest IBM supercomputer, Blue Gene, has 147,456 processors, more than 144 terabytes of memory, occupies a huge, air-conditioned cabinet, and consumes more than 2 megawatts of power.

As a hypothetical application, IBM said that a cognitive computer could monitor the world’s water supply via a network of sensors and tiny motors that constantly record and report data such as temperature, pressure, wave height, acoustics, and ocean tide. It could then issue tsunami warnings in case of an earthquake. Or, a grocer stocking shelves could use an instrumented glove that monitors sights, smells, texture and temperature to flag contaminated produce. Or a computer could absorb data and flag unsafe intersections that are prone to traffic accidents. Those tasks are too hard for traditional computers.

Synapse is funded with a $21 million grant from DARPA, and it involve six IBM labs, four universities (Cornell, the University of Wisconsin, University of California at Merced, and Columbia) and a number of government researchers.

For phase 2, IBM is working with a team of researchers that includes Columbia University; Cornell University; University of
California, Merced; and University of Wisconsin, Madison. While this project is new, IBM has been studying brain-like computing as far back as 1956, when it created the world’s first (512 neuron) brain simulation.

“If this works, this is not just a 5 percent leap,” Modha said. “This is a leap of orders of magnitude forward. We have already overcome huge conceptual roadblocks.”

[Photo credits: Dean Takahashi, IBM]

Via input output

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In the fall of 1977, I experimented with a newfangled PC, a Radio Shack TRS-80. For data storage it used—I kid you not—a cassette tape player. Tape had a long history with computing; I had used the IBM 2420 9-track tape system on IBM 360/370 mainframes to load software and to back-up data. Magnetic tape was common for storage in pre-personal computing days, but it had two main annoyances: it held tiny amounts of data, and it was slower than a slug on a cold spring morning. There had to be something better, for those of us excited about technology. And there was: the floppy disk.

Welcome to the floppy disk family: 8”, 5.25” and 3.5”

In the mid-70s I had heard about floppy drives, but they were expensive, exotic equipment. I didn't know that IBM had decided as early as 1967 that tape-drives, while fine for back-ups, simply weren't good enough to load software on mainframes. So it was that Alan Shugart assigned David L. Noble to lead the development of “a reliable and inexpensive system for loading microcode into the IBM System/370 mainframes using a process called Initial Control Program Load (ICPL).” From this project came the first 8-inch floppy disk.

Oh yes, before the 5.25-inch drives you remember were the 8-inch floppy. By 1978 I was using them on mainframes; later I would use them on Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) dedicated cataloging PCs.

The 8-inch drive began to show up in 1971. Since they enabled developers and users to stop using the dreaded paper tape (which were easy to fold, spindle, and mutilate, not to mention to pirate) and the loathed IBM 5081 punch card. Everyone who had ever twisted a some tape or—the horror!—dropped a deck of Hollerith cards was happy to adopt 8-inch drives.

Before floppy drives, we often had to enter data using punch cards.

Besides, the early single-sided 8-inch floppy could hold the data of up to 3,000 punch cards, or 80K to you. I know that's nothing today — this article uses up 66K with the text alone – but then it was a big deal.

Some early model microcomputers, such as the Xerox 820 and Xerox Alto, used 8-inch drives, but these first generation floppies never broke through to the larger consumer market. That honor would go to the next generation of the floppy: the 5.25 inch model.

By 1972, Shugart had left IBM and founded his own company, Shugart Associates. In 1975, Wang, which at the time owned the then big-time dedicated word processor market, approached Shugart about creating a computer that would fit on top of a desk. To do that, Wang needed a smaller, cheaper floppy disk.

According to Don Massaro (PDF link), another IBMer who followed Shugart to the new business, Wang’s founder Charles Wang said, “I want to come out with a much lower-end word processor. It has to be much lower cost and I can't afford to pay you $200 for your 8" floppy; I need a $100 floppy.”

So, Shugart and company started working on it. According to Massaro, “We designed the 5 1/4" floppy drive in terms of the overall design, what it should look like, in a car driving up to Herkimer, New York to visit Mohawk Data Systems.” The design team stopped at a stationery store to buy cardboard while trying to figure out what size the diskette should be. “It's real simple, the reason why it was 5¼,” he said. “5 1/4 was the smallest diskette that you could make that would not fit in your pocket. We didn't want to put it in a pocket because we didn't want it bent, okay?”

Shugart also designed the diskette to be that size because an analysis of the cassette tape drives and their bays in microcomputers showed that a 5.25” drive was as big as you could fit into the PCs of the day.

According to another story from Jimmy Adkisson, a Shugart engineer, “Jim Adkisson and Don Massaro were discussing the proposed drive's size with Wang. The trio just happened to be doing their discussing at a bar. An Wang motioned to a drink napkin and stated 'about that size' which happened to be 5 1/4-inches wide.”

Wang wasn’t the most important element in the success of the 5.25-inch floppy. George Sollman, another Shugart engineer, took an early model of the 5.25” drive to a Home Brew Computer Club meeting. “The following Wednesday or so, Don came to my office and said, 'There's a bum in the lobby,’” Sollman says. “‘And, in marketing, you're in charge of cleaning up the lobby. Would you get the bum out of the lobby?’ So I went out to the lobby and this guy is sitting there with holes in both knees. He really needed a shower in a bad way but he had the most dark, intense eyes and he said, 'I've got this thing we can build.'”

The bum's name was Steve Jobs and the “thing” was the Apple II.

Apple had also used cassette drives for its first computers. Jobs knew his computers also needed a smaller, cheaper, and better portable data storage system. In late 1977, the Apple II was made available with optional 5.25” floppy drives manufactured by Shugart. One drive ordinarily held programs, while the other could be used to store your data. (Otherwise, you had to swap floppies back-and-forth when you needed to save a file.)

The PC that made floppy disks a success: 1977's Apple II

The floppy disk seems so simple now, but it changed everything. As IBM's history of the floppy disk states, this was a big advance in user-friendliness. “But perhaps the greatest impact of the floppy wasn’t on individuals, but on the nature and structure of the IT industry. Up until the late 1970s, most software applications for tasks such as word processing and accounting were written by the personal computer owners themselves. But thanks to the floppy, companies could write programs, put them on the disks, and sell them through the mail or in stores. 'It made it possible to have a software industry,' says Lee Felsenstein, a pioneer of the PC industry who designed the Osborne 1, the first mass-produced portable computer. Before networks became widely available for PCs, people used floppies to share programs and data with each other—calling it the 'sneakernet.'”

In short, it was the floppy disk that turned microcomputers into personal computers.

 Which of these drives did you own?

The success of the Apple II made the 5.25” drive the industry standard. The vast majority of CP/M-80 PCs, from the late 70s to early 80s, used this size floppy drive. When the first IBM PC arrived in 1981 you had your choice of one or two 160 kilobyte (K – yes, just oneK) floppy drives.

Throughout the early 80s, the floppy drive became the portable storage format. (Tape quickly was relegated to business back-ups.) At first, the floppy disk drives were only built with one read/write head, but another set of heads were quickly incorporated. This meant that when the IBM XT PC arrived in 1983, double-sided floppies could hold up to 360K of data.

There were some bumps along the road to PC floppy drive compatibility. Some companies, such as DEC with its DEC Rainbow, introduced its own non-compatible 5.25” floppy drives. They were single-sided but with twice the density, and in 1983 a single box of 10 disks cost $45 – twice the price of the standard disks.

In the end, though, market forces kept the various non-compatible disk formats from splitting the PC market into separate blocks. (How the data was stored was another issue, however. Data stored on a CP/M system was unreadable on a PC-DOS drive, for examples, so dedicated applications like Media Master promised to convert data from one format to another.)

That left lots of room for innovation within the floppy drive mainstream. In 1984, IBM introduced the IBM Advanced Technology (AT) computer. This model came with a high-density 5.25-inch drive, which could handle disks that could up hold up to 1.2MB of data.

A variety of other floppy drives and disk formats were tried. These included 2.0, 2.5, 2.8, 3.0, 3.25, and 4.0 inch formats. Most quickly died off, but one, the 3.5” size – introduced by Sony in 1980 – proved to be a winner.

The 3.5 disk didn't really take off until 1982. Then, the Microfloppy Industry Committeeapproved a variation of the Sony design and the “new” 3.5” drive was quickly adopted by Apple for the Macintosh, by Commodore for the Amiga, and by Atari for its Atari ST PC. The mainstream PC market soon followed and by 1988, the more durable 3.5” disks outsold the 5.25” floppy disks. (During the transition, however, most of us configured our PCs to have both a 3.5” drive and a 5.25” drive, in addition to the by-now-ubiquitous hard disks. Still, most of us eventually ran into at least one situation in which we had a file on a 5.25” disk and no floppy drive to read it on.)

I

 The one 3.5” diskette that everyone met at one time or another: An AOL install disk.

The first 3.5” disks could only hold 720K. But they soon became popular because of the more convenient pocket-size format and their somewhat-sturdier construction (if you rolled an office chair over one of these, you had a chance that the data might survive). Another variation of the drive, using Modified Frequency Modulation (MFM) encoding, pushed 3.5” diskettes storage up to 1.44Mbs in IBM's PS/2 and Apple's Mac IIx computers in the mid to late 1980s.

By then, though floppy drives would continue to evolve, other portable technologies began to surpass them.

In 1991, Jobs introduced the extended-density (ED) 3.5” floppy on his NeXT computer line. These could hold up to 2.8MBs. But it wasn't enough. A variety of other portable formats that could store more data came along, such as magneto-optical drives and Iomega's Zip drive, and they started pushing floppies out of business.

The real floppy killers, though, were read-writable CDs, DVDs, and, the final nail in the coffin: USB flash drives. Today, a 64GB flash drive can hold more data than every floppy disk I've ever owned all rolled together.

Apple prospered the most from the floppy drive but ironically was the first to abandon it as read-writable CDs and DVDs took over. The 1998 iMac was the first consumer computer to ship without any floppy drive.

However, the floppy drive took more than a decade to die. Sony, which at the end owned 70% of what was left of the market, announced in 2010 that it was stopping the manufacture of 3.5” diskettes.

Today, you can still buy new 1.44MB floppy drives and floppy disks, but for the other formats you need to look to eBay or yard sales. If you really want a new 3.5” drive or disks, I'd get them sooner than later. Their day is almost done.

But, as they disappear even from memory, we should strive to remember just how vitally important floppy disks were in their day. Without them, our current computer world simply could not exist. Before the Internet was open to the public, it was floppy disks that let us create and trade programs and files. They really were what put the personal in “personal computing.”

Via Monday Note

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Once upon a time, Steve Ballmer blasted Apple for asking its customers to pay $500 for an Apple logo. This was the “Apple Tax“, the price difference between the solid, professional workmanship of a laptop running on Windows, and Apple’s needlessly elegant MacBooks.

Following last week’s verdict against Samsung, the kommentariat have raised the specter of an egregious new Apple Tax, one that Apple will levy on other smartphone makers who will have no choice but to pass the burden on to you. The idea is this: Samsung’s loss means it will now have to compete against Apple with its dominant hand — a lower price tag — tied behind its back. This will allow Apple to exact higher prices for its iPhones (and iPads) and thus inflict even more pain and suffering on consumers.

There seems to be a moral aspect, here, as if Apple should be held to a higher standard. Last year, Apple and Nokia settled an IP “misunderstanding” that also resulted in a “Tax”…but it was Nokia that played the T-Man role: Apple paid Nokia more than $600M plus an estimated $11.50 per iPhone sold. Where were the handwringers who now accuse Apple of abusing the patent system when the Nokia settlement took place? Where was the outrage against the “evil”, if hapless, Finnish company? (Amusingly, observers speculate that Nokia has made more money from these IP arrangements than from selling its own Lumia smartphones.)

Even where the moral tone is muted, the significance of the verdict (which you can read in full here) is over-dramatized. For instance, see this August 24th Wall Street Journal story sensationally titled After Verdict, Prepare for the ‘Apple Tax’:

After its stunning victory against rival device-maker Samsung Electronics Co., experts say consumers should expect smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices that license various Apple Inc., design and software innovations to be more expensive to produce.

“There may be a big Apple tax,” said IDC analyst Al Hilwa. “Phones will be more expensive.”

The reason is that rival device makers will likely have to pay to license the various Apple technologies the company sought to protect in court. The jury found that Samsung infringed as many as seven Apple patents, awarding $1.05 billion in damages.

The $1B sum awarded to Apple sounds impressive, but to the giants involved, it doesn’t really change much. Samsung’s annual marketing budget is about $2.75B (it covers washer-dryers and TVs, but it’s mostly smartphones), and, of course, Apple is sitting on a $100B+ cash hoard.

Then there’s the horror over the open-ended nature of the decision: Apple can continue to seek injunctions against products that infringe on their patents. From the NYT article:

…the decision could essentially force [Samsung] and other smartphone makers to redesign their products to be less Apple-like, or risk further legal defeats.

Certainly, injunctions could pose a real threat. They could remove competitors, make Apple more dominant, give it more pricing power to the consumer’s detriment…but none of this is a certainty. Last week’s verdict and any follow-up injunctions are sure to be appealed and appealed again until all avenues are exhausted. The Apple Tax won’t be enforced for several years, if ever.

And even if the “Tax” is assessed, will it have a deleterious impact on device manufacturers and consumers? Last year, about half of all Android handset makers— including ZTE, HTC, Sharp — were handed a Microsoft Tax bill ($27 per phone in ZTE’s case), one that isn’t impeded by an obstacle course of appeals. Count Samsung in this group: The Korean giant reportedly agreed to pay Microsoft“between $10 and $15 – for each Android smartphone or tablet computer it sells.” Sell 100M devices and the tax bill owed to Ballmer and Co. exceeds $1B. Despite this onerous surcharge, Android devices thrive, and Samsung has quickly jumped to the lead in the Android handset race (from Informa, Telecoms & Media):

Amusingly, the Samsung verdict prompted this gloating tweet from Microsoft exec Bill Cox:

Windows Phone is looking gooooood right now.

(Or, as AllThingsD interpreted it: Microsoft to Samsung. Mind if I Revel in Your Misfortune for a Moment?)

The subtext is clear: Android handset makers should worry about threats to the platform and seek safe harbor with the “Apple-safe” Windows Phone 8. This will be a “goooood” thing all around: If more handset makers offer Windows Phone devices, there will be more choices, fewer opportunities for Apple to get “unfairly high” prices for its iDevices. The detrimental effects, to consumers, of the “Apple Tax” might not be so bad, after all.

The Samsung trial recalls the interesting peace agreement that Apple and Microsoft forged in 1997, when Microsoft “invested” $150M in Apple as a fig-leaf for an IP settlement (see the end of the Quora article). The interesting part of the accord is the provision in which the companies agree that they won’t “clone” each other’s products. If Microsoft could arrange a cross-license agreement with Apple that includes an anti-cloning provision and eventually come up with its own original work (everyone agrees that Microsoft’s Modern UI is elegant, interesting, not just a knock-off), how come Samsung didn’t reach a similar arrangement and produce its own distinctive look and feel?

Microsoft and Apple saw that an armed peace was a better solution than constant IP conflicts. Can Samsung and Apple decide to do something similar and feed engineers rather than platoons of high-priced lawyers (the real winners in these battles)?

It’s a nice thought but I doubt it’ll happen. Gates and Jobs had known one another for a long time; there was animosity, but also familiarity. There is no such comfort between Apple and Samsung execs. There is, instead, a wide cultural divide.

Via Daily Mail

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A promotional video created to promote the concept shows drinkers entering a bar, and then being offerend cheap drinks as they are recognised.

'Facebook check-ins are a powerful mechanism for businesses to deliver discounts to loyal customers, yet few businesses—and fewer customers—have realized it,' said Nashville-based advertising agency Redpepper.

They are already trialling the scheme in firms close to their office.

'A search for businesses with active deals in our area turned up a measly six offers.

'The odds we’ll ever be at one of those six spots are low (a strip club and photography studio among them), and the incentives for a check-in are not nearly enticing enough for us to take the time.

'So we set out to evolve the check-in and sweeten the deal, making both irresistible.

'We call it Facedeals.'

The Facedeal camera can identify faces when people walk in by comparing Facebook pictures of people who have signed up to the service

Facebook recently hit the headlines when it bought face.com, an Israeli firm that pioneered the use of face recognition technology online.

The social networking giant uses the software to recognise people in uploaded pictures, allowing it to accurately spot friends.

The software uses a complex algorithm to find the correct person from their Facebook pictures

The Facebook camera requires people to have authorised the Facedeals app through their Facebook account.

This verifies your most recent photo tags and maps the biometric data of your face.

The system then learns what a user looks like as more pictures are approved.

This data is then used to identify you in the real world.

In a demonstration video, the firm behind the camera showed it being used to offer free drinks to customers if they signed up to the system.

Via 52Tiger

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The story of Apple’s iPad is incredible, especially considering how young the device is. Released in April of 2010, the iPad has redefined and dominated the tablet market (if there even is a tablet market) and spawned a radical change in how tablet devices look and operate.

Of course, Apple didn’t cut the iPad from whole cloth (which probably would have been linen). It was built upon decades of ideas, tests, products and more ideas. Before we explore the iPad’s story, it’s appropriate to consider the tablets and the pen-driven devices that preceded it.

So Popular So Quickly

Today the iPad is so popular that it’s easy to overlook that it’s only three years old. Apple has updated it just twice. Here’s a little perspective to reinforce the iPad’s tender age:

1. When J. K. Rowling published Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, there was no iPad.
2. When President Barak Obama was inaugurated as America’s 44th president, there was no iPad.
3. In 2004 when the Boston Red Sox broke the Curse of the Bambino and won the World Series for the first time in 86 years, there was no iPad. Nor did it exist three years later, when they won the championship again.

I can’t think of another piece of technology that grew so quickly. The Telegraph said the iPad is among the fastest growing technologies in history. But before we examine where the iPad is, let’s consider where it came from.

Elisha Gray and the Telautograph

Elisha Gray was an electrical engineer and inventor who lived in Ohio and Massachusetts between 1835 and 1901. Elisha was a wonderful little geek, and became interested in electricity while studying at Oberlin College. He collected nearly 70 patents in his lifetime, including that of the Telautograph. [PDF].

The Telautograph let a person use a stylus that was connected to two rheostats, which managed the current produced by the amount of resistance generated as the operator wrote with the stylus. That electronic record was transmitted to a second Telautograph, reproducing the author’s writing on a scroll of paper. Mostly. Gray noted that, since the scroll of paper was moving, certain letters were difficult or impossible to produce. For example, you couldn’t “…dot an i or cross a t or underscore or erase a word.” Users had to get creative.

Still, the thing was a hit, and was used in hospitals, clinics, insurance firms, hotels (as communication between the front desk and housekeeping), banks and train dispatching. Even the US Air Force used the Telautograph to disseminate weather reports. It’s true that the Telautograph is more akin to a fax machine than a contemporary tablet, yet it was the first electronic writing device to receive a patent, which was awarded in 1888.

Of course, ‘ol Elisha is better known for arriving at the US patent office on Valentine’s Day, 1876, with what he described as an apparatus “for transmitting vocal sounds telegraphically” just two hours after Mr. Alexander Graham Bell showed up with a description of a device that accomplished the same feat. After years of litigation, Bell was legally declared the inventor of what we now call the telephone, even though the device described in his original patent application wouldn’t have worked (Gray’s would have). So Gray/Bell have a Edison/Tesla thing going on.

Back to tablets.

Research Continues

Research continued after the turn of the century. The US Patent Office awarded a patent to Mr. Hyman Eli Goldberg of Chicago in 1918, for his invention of the Controller. This device concerned the “a moveable element, a transmitting sheet, a character on said sheet formed of conductive ink and electrically controlled operating mechanism for said moveable element.” It’s considered the first patent awarded for a handwriting recognition user interface with a stylus.

Photo credit: Computer History Museum

Jumping ahead a bit, we find the Styalator (early 1950’s) and the RAND tablet (1964). Both used a pen and a tablet-like surface for input. The RAND (above) is more well-known and cost an incredible $18,000. Remember, that’s 18 grand in 1960?s money. Both bear little resemblance to contemporary tablet computers, and consisted of a tablet surface and an electronic pen. Their massive bulk — and price tags ?- made them a feasible purchase for few.

Alan Kay and the Dynabook

In 1968, things got real. Almost. Computer scientist Alan Kay ¹ described his concept for a computer meant for children. His “Dynabook” would be small, thin, lightweight and shaped like a tablet.

In a paper entitled “A Personal Computer For Children Of All Ages,” [PDF] Kay described his vision for the Dynabook:

”The size should be no larger than a notebook; weigh less than 4 lbs.; the visual display should be able to present 4,000 printing quality characters with contrast ratios approaching that of a book; dynamic graphics of reasonable quality should be possible; there should be removable local file storage of at least one million characters (about 500 ordinary book pages) traded off against several hours audio (voice/music) files.”

In the video below, Kay explains his thoughts on the original prototype:

That’s truly amazing vision. Alas, the Dynabook as Kay envisioned it was never produced.

Apple’s First Tablet

The first commercial tablet product from Apple appeared in 1979. The Apple Graphics Tablet was meant to compliment the Apple II and use the “Utopia Graphics System” developed by musician Todd Rundgren. ² That’s right, Todd Rundgren. The FCC soon found that it caused radio frequency interference, unfortunately, and forced Apple to discontinue production.

A revised version was released in the early 1980’s, which Apple described like this:

“The Apple Graphics Tablet turns your Apple II system into an artist’s canvas. The tablet offers an exciting medium with easy to use tools and techniques for creating and displaying pictured/pixelated information. When used with the Utopia Graphics Tablet System, the number of creative alternatives available to you multiplies before your eyes.

The Utopia Graphics Tablet System includes a wide array of brush types for producing original shapes and functions, and provides 94 color options that can generate 40 unique brush shades. The Utopia Graphics Tablet provides a very easy way to create intricate designs, brilliant colors, and animated graphics.”

The GRiDpad

This early touchscreen device cost $2,370 in 1989 and reportedly inspired Jeff Hawkins to create the first Palm Pilot. Samsung manufactured the GRiDpad PenMaster, which weighed under 5 lbs., was 11.5“ x 9.3” x 1.48? and ran on a 386SL 20MHz processor with a 80387SX coprocessor. It had 20 MB RAM and the internal hard drive was available at 40 MB, 60 MB, 80 MB or 120 MB. DigiBarn has a nice GRiDpad gallery.

The Newton Message Pad

With Steve Jobs out of the picture, Apple launched its second pen-computing product, the Newton Message Pad. Released in 1993, the Message Pad was saddled with iffy handwriting recognition and poor marketing efforts. Plus, the size was odd; too big to fit comfortably in a pocket yet small enough to suggest that’s where it ought to go.

The Newton platform evolved and improved in the following years, but was axed in 1998 (I still use one, but I’m a crazy nerd).

Knight-Ridder and the Tablet Newspaper

This one is compelling. Back in 1994, media and Internet publishing company Knight-Ridder ³ produced a video demonstrating its faith in digital newspaper. Its predictions are eerily accurate, except for this bold statement:

“Many of the technologists…assume that information is just a commodity and people really don’t care where that information comes from as long as it matches their set of personal interests. I disagree with that view. People recognize the newspapers they subscribe to…and there is a loyalty attached to those.”

Knight-Ridder got a lot right, but I’m afraid the technologists quoted above were wrong. Just ask any contemporary newspaper publisher.

The Late Pre-iPad Tablet Market

Many other devices appeared at this time, but what I call the “The Late Pre-iPad Tablet Market” kicked off when Bill Gates introduced the Compaq tablet PC in 2001. That year, Gates made a bold prediction at COMDEX:

“‘The PC took computing out of the back office and into everyone’s office,’ said Gates. ‘The Tablet takes cutting-edge PC technology and makes it available wherever you want it, which is why I’m already using a Tablet as my everyday computer. It’s a PC that is virtually without limits – and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America.’”

Others followed, like the Axiotron ModBook, which is essentially an Apple MacBook modified into a tablet configuration (a “Pro” model has recently been released) and the Motion Computing LS800.

None of these devices, including those I didn’t mention, saw the success of the iPad. That must be due to in a large part to iOS. While the design was changing dramatically — flat, touch screen, light weight, portable — the operating system was stagnant and inappropriate. When Gates released the Compaq tablet in 2001, it was running Windows XP. That system was built for a desktop computer and it simply didn’t work on a touch-based tablet.

Meanwhile, others dreamed of what could be, unhindered by the limitations of hardware and software. Or reality.

Tablets in Pop Culture

The most famous fictional tablet device must be Star Trek’s Personal Access Display Device or “PADD.” The first PADDs appeared as large, wedge-shaped clipboards in the original Star Trek series and seemed to operate with a stylus exclusively. Kirk and other officers were always signing them with a stylus, as if the yeomen were interstellar UPS drivers and Kirk was receiving a lot of packages. ⁴

As new Trek shows were developed, new PADD models appeared. The devices went multi-touch in The Next Generation, adopting the LCARS Interface. A stylus was still used from time to time, though there was less signing. And signing. Aaand signing.

In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, David Bowman and Frank Poole use flat, tablet-like devices to send and receive news from Earth. In his novel, Arthur C. Clarke described the “Newspad” like this:

“When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit’s short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him.

Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.

Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word ‘newspaper,’ of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites.

It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg.”

The iPad was released in 2010, so Clarke missed reality by only nine years. Not bad for a book published in 1968.

Next Time: Apple Rumors Begin

In the next article in this series, I’ll pick things up in the early 2000’s when rumors of an Apple-branded tablet gained momentum. For now, I’ll leave you with this quote from an adamant Steve Jobs, taken from an AllThingsD conference in 2003:

“Walt Mossberg: A lot of people think given the success you’ve had with portable devices, you should be making a tablet or a PDA.

Steve Jobs: There are no plans to make a tablet. It turns out people want keyboards. When Apple first started out, people couldn’t type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this. We look at the tablet and we think it’s going to fail. Tablets appeal to rich guys with plenty of other PCs and devices already. I get a lot of pressure to do a PDA. What people really seem to want to do with these is get the data out. We believe cell phones are going to carry this information. We didn’t think we’d do well in the cell phone business. What we’ve done instead is we’ve written what we think is some of the best software in the world to start syncing information between devices. We believe that mode is what cell phones need to get to. We chose to do the iPod instead of a PDA.”

We’ll pick it up from there next time. Until then, go and grab your iPad and give a quiet thanks to Elisha Gray, Hyman Eli Goldberg, Alan Kay, the Newton team, Charles Landon Knight and Herman Ridder, Bill Gates and yes, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke and Gene Roddenberry. Without them and many others, you might not be holding that wonderful little device.

1. More recently known as a co-developer on the the One Laptop Per Child machine. The computer itself was inspired, in part, by Kay’s work on the Dynabook.
2. I’m really sorry for all the Flash on Todd’s site. It’s awful.
3. Not Knight Rider.
4. Not a euphemism. OK, maybe.

Via DVICE

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Via Tech Hive

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If you follow the world of Android tablets and phones, you may have heard a lot about Tegra 3 over the last year. Nvidia's chip currently powers many of the top Android tablets, and should be found in a few Android smartphones by the end of the year. It may even form the foundation of several upcoming Windows 8 tablets and possibly future phones running Windows Phone 8. So what is the Tegra 3 chip, and why should you care whether or not your phone or tablet is powered by one?

Nvidia's system-on-chip

Tegra is the brand for Nvidia's line of system-on-chip (SoC) products for phones, tablets, media players, automobiles, and so on. What's a system-on-chip? Essentially, it's a single chip that combines all the major functions needed for a complete computing system: CPU cores, graphics, media encoding and decoding, input-output, and even cellular or Wi-Fi communcations and radios. The Tegra series competes with chips like Qualcomm's Snapdragon, Texas Instruments' OMAP, and Samsung's Exynos.

The first Tegra chip was a flop. It was used in very few products, notably the ill-fated Zune HD and Kin smartphones from Microsoft. Tegra 2, an improved dual-core processor, was far more successful but still never featured in enough devices to become a runaway hit.

Tegra 3 has been quite the success so far. It is found in a number of popular Android tablets like the Eee Pad Transformer Prime, and is starting to find its way into high-end phones like the global version of the HTC One X (the North American version uses a dual-core Snapdragon S4 instead, as Tegra 3 had not been qualified to work with LTE modems yet). Expect to see it in more Android phones and tablets internationally this fall.

4 + 1 cores

Tegra 3 is based on the ARM processor design and architecture, as are most phone and tablet chips today. There are many competing ARM-based SoCs, but Tegra 3 was one of the first to include four processor cores. There are now other quad-core SoCs from Texas Instruments and Samsung, but Nvidia's has a unique defining feature: a fifth low-power core.

All five of the processor cores are based on the ARM Cortex-A9 design, but the fifth core is made using a special low-power process that sips battery at low speeds, but doesn't scale up to high speeds very well. It is limited to only 500MHz, while the other cores run up to 1.4GHz (or 1.5GHz in single-core mode).

When your phone or tablet is in sleep mode, or you're just performing very simple operations or using very basic apps, like the music player, Tegra 3 shuts down its four high-power cores and uses only the low-power core. It's hard to say if this makes it far more efficient than other ARM SoCs, but battery life on some Tegra 3 tablets has been quite good.

Good, not great, graphics

Nvidia's heritage is in graphics processors. The company's claim to fame has been its GPUs for traditional laptops, desktops, and servers. You might expect Tegra 3 to have the best graphics processing power of any tablet or phone chip, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Direct graphics comparisons can be difficult, but there's a good case to be made that the A5X processor in the new iPad has a far more powerful graphics processor. Still, Tegra 3 has plenty of graphics power, and Nvidia works closely with game developers to help them optimize their software for the platform. Tegra 3 supports high-res display output (up to 2560 x 1600) and improved video decoding capabilities compared to earlier Tegra chips.

Do you need one?

The million-dollar question is: Does the Tegra 3 chip provide a truly better experience than other SoCs? Do you need four cores, or even "4 + 1"? The answer is no. Most smartphone and tablet apps don't make great use of multiple CPU cores, and making each core faster can often do more for the user experience than adding more cores. That said, you shouldn't avoid a product because it has a Tegra 3 chip, either. Its performance and battery life appear to be quite competitive in today's tablet and phone market. Increasingly, the overall quality of a product is determined by its design, size, weight, display quality, camera quality, and other features more than mere processor performance. Consider PCWorld's review of the North American HTC One X; with the dual-core Snapdragon S4 instead of Tegra 3, performance was still very impressive.

Via The Atlantic

By Alexis Madrigal

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Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcch*ding*ding*ding"

Modem dialup by John Pemberton

Of all the noises that my children will not understand, the one that is nearest to my heart is not from a song or a television show or a jingle. It's the sound of a modem connecting with another modem across the repurposed telephone infrastructure. It was the noise of being part of the beginning of the Internet.

I heard that sound again this week on Brendan Chillcut's simple and wondrous site: The Museum of Endangered Sounds. It takes technological objects and lets you relive the noises they made: Tetris, the Windows 95 startup chime, that Nokia ringtone, television static. The site archives not just the intentional sounds -- ringtones, etc -- but the incidental ones, like the mechanical noise a VHS tape made when it entered the VCR or the way a portable CD player sounded when it skipped. If you grew up at a certain time, these sounds are like technoaural nostalgia whippets. One minute, you're browsing the Internet in 2012, the next you're on a bus headed up I-5 to an 8th grade football game against Castle Rock in 1995.

The noises our technologies make, as much as any music, are the soundtrack to an era. Soundscapes are not static; completely new sets of frequencies arrive, old things go. Locomotives rumbled their way through the landscapes of 19th century New England, interrupting Nathaniel Hawthorne-types' reveries in Sleepy Hollows. A city used to be synonymous with the sound of horse hooves and the clatter of carriages on the stone streets. Imagine the people who first heard the clicks of a bike wheel or the vroom of a car engine. It's no accident that early films featuring industrial work often include shots of steam whistles, even though in many (say, Metropolis) we can't hear that whistle.

When I think of 2012, I will think of the overworked fan of my laptop and the ding of getting a text message on my iPhone. I will think of the beep of the FastTrak in my car as it debits my credit card so I can pass through a toll onto the Golden Gate Bridge. I will think of Siri's uncanny valley voice.

But to me, all of those sounds -- as symbols of the era in which I've come up -- remain secondary to the hissing and crackling of the modem handshake. I first heard that sound as a nine-year-old. To this day, I can't remember how I figured out how to dial the modem of our old Zenith. Even more mysterious is how I found the BBS number to call or even knew what a BBS was. But I did. BBS were dial-in communities, kind of like a local AOL. You could post messages and play games, even chat with people on the bigger BBSs. It was personal: sometimes, you'd be the only person connected to that community. Other times, there'd be one other person, who was almost definitely within your local prefix.

When we moved to Ridgefield, which sits outside Portland, Oregon, I had a summer with no friends and no school: The telephone wire became a lifeline. I discovered Country Computing, a BBS I've eulogized before, located in a town a few miles from mine. The rural Washington BBS world was weird and fun, filled with old ham-radio operators and computer nerds.  After my parents' closed up shop for the work day, their "fax line" became my modem line, and I called across the I-5 to play games and then, slowly, to participate in the nascent community.

In the beginning of those sessions, there was the sound, and the sound was data.

Fascinatingly, there's no good guide to the what the beeps and hisses represent that I could find on the Internet. For one, few people care about the technical details of 1997's hottest 56k modems. And for another, whatever good information exists out there predates the popular explosion of the web and the all-knowing Google.

So, I asked on Twitter and was rewarded with an accessible and elegant explanation from another user whose nom-de-plume is Miso Susanowa. (Susanowa used to run a BBS.) I transformed it into the annotated graphic below, which explains the modem sound part-by-part. (You can click it to make it bigger.)

This is a choreographed sequence that allowed these digital devices to piggyback on an analog telephone network. "A phone line carries only the small range of frequencies in which most human conversation takes place: about 300 to 3,300 hertz," Glenn Fleishman explained in the Times back in 1998. "The modem works within these limits in creating sound waves to carry data across phone lines." What you're hearing is the way 20th century technology tunneled through a 19th century network; what you're hearing is how a network designed to send the noises made by your muscles as they pushed around air came to transmit anything, or the almost-anything that can be coded in 0s and 1s.

The frequencies of the modem's sounds represent parameters for further communication. In the early going, for example, the modem that's been dialed up will play a note that says, "I can go this fast." As a wonderful old 1997 website explained, "Depending on the speed the modem is trying to talk at, this tone will have a different pitch."

That is to say, the sounds weren't a sign that data was being transferred: they were the data being transferred. This noise was the analog world being bridged by the digital. If you are old enough to remember it, you still knew a world that was analog-first.

Long before I actually had this answer in hand, I could sense that the patterns of the beats and noise meant something. The sound would move me, my head nodding to the beeps that followed the initial connection. You could feel two things trying to come into sync: Were they computers or me and my version of the world?

Via LinuxInsider

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Bigger may be better if you're from Texas, but it's becoming increasingly clear to the rest of us that it really is a small world after all.

Case in point? None other than what one might reasonably call the invasion of tiny Linux PCs going on all around us.

We've got the Raspberry Pi, we've got the Cotton Candy. Add to those the Mele A1000, the VIA APC, the MK802 and more, and it's becoming increasingly difficult not to compute like a Lilliputian.

Where's it all going? That's what Linux bloggers have been pondering in recent days. Down at the seedy Broken Windows Lounge the other night, Linux Girl got an earful.

It's 'Fantastic'

"Linux has been heading towards one place for many years now: complete and total world domination!" quipped Thoughts on Technology blogger and Bodhi Linux lead developer Jeff Hoogland.

"All joking aside, these new devices simply further showcase Linux's unmatched ability to be flexible across an array of different devices of all sizes and power," Hoogland added.

"Having a slew of devices that are powerful enough for users to browse the web -- which, let's be honest, is all a good deal of people do these days -- for under 100 USD is fantastic," he concluded.

'It Only Gets More Exciting'

Similarly, "I believe that the medley of tiny Linux PCs we're seeing hitting the market lately is the true sign of the Post PC Era," suggested Google+ blogger Linux Rants.

"The smartphone started it, but the Post PC Era will begin in earnest when the functionality that we currently see in the home computer is replaced by numerous small appliance-type devices," Linux Rants explained. "These tiny Linux PCs are the harbinger of those appliances -- small, low-cost, programmable devices that can be made into virtually anything the owner desires."

Other devices we're already seeing include "the oven that you can turn on with a text message, the espresso machine that you can control with a text message, home security systems and cars that can be controlled from your smartphone," he added. "This is where the Post PC Era begins, and it only gets more exciting from here."

'There Is No Reason Not to Do It'

This is "definitely the wave of the future," agreed Google+ blogger Kevin O'Brien.

"Devices of all kinds are getting smaller and smaller, while simultaneously increasing their power," O'Brien explained. "Exponential growth does that over time.

"My phone in my pocket right now has more computing power than the rockets that went to the moon," he added. "And if you look ahead, a few more turns of exponential growth means we'll have the equivalent of a full desktop computer the size of an SD card within a few years."

At that point, "everything starts to be computerized, because adding a little intelligence is so cheap there is no reason not to do it," O'Brien concluded.

'We're Approaching That Future'

Indeed, "many including myself have long been harping on the fact that today's computers are orders of magnitude faster than early systems on which we ran graphic interfaces and got work done, and yet are dismissed as toys," Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza told Linux Girl.

"A friend suggested to me once that eventually microwave ovens would contain little Unix servers 'on a chip' because that would be basically all you could get, because it would actually be cheaperto use such a system when given the cost of developing an alternative," he said. "Seeing the cost of these new products it looks to me like we're approaching that future rapidly.

"There has always been demand for low-cost computers, and the massive proliferation of low-cost, low-power cores has pushed their price down to the point where we can finally have them," Espinoza concluded.

"Even adjusted for inflation," he said, "many of these computers are an order of magnitude cheaper than the cheapest useful home computers from the time when personal computing began to gain popularity, and yet they are certainly powerful enough to serve many roles including many people's main or even only 'computer.'"

'It Gives Me Hope'

Consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack was similarly enthusiastic.

"I love it," Mack told Linux Girl.

"When I was a child, my parents brought home all sorts of fun things to tinker with, and I learned while doing it," he explained. "But these last few years it seems like the learning electronics and their equivalents have disappeared into a mass of products that are only for what the manufacturer designed them for and nothing else.

"I am loving the return of my ability to tinker," Mack concluded. "It gives me hope that there can be a next generation of kids who can love the enjoyment of simply creating things."

'They Look a Bit Expensive'

Not everyone was thrilled, however.

"Okay, I am not all that excited about the invasion of the tiny PC," admitted Roberto Lim, a lawyer and blogger on Mobile Raptor.

"With 7-inch Android tablets with capacitive displays, running Android 4.0 and with access to Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Play's Android app market, 8 GB or storage expandable via a Micro SD card, 1080p video playback, a USB port and HDMI out and 3000 to 4000 mAh batteries starting at US$90, it is a bit hard to get excited about these tiny PCs," Lim explained.

"Despite the low prices of the tiny PCs, they all look a bit expensive when compared to what is already in the market," he opined.

'These Devices Have a Niche'

The category really isn't even all that new, Slashdot blogger hairyfeet opined.

"There have been mini ARM-based Linux boxes for several years now," he explained. "From portable media players to routers to set-top boxes, there are a ton of little bitty boxes running embedded Linux."

It's not even quite right to call such devices PCs "because PC has an already well-defined meaning: it was originally 'IBM PC compatible,'" hairyfeet added. "Even if you give them the benefit of the doubt, PCs have always been general use computers, and these things are FAR from general use."

Rather, "they are designed with a very specific and narrow job in mind," he said. "Trying to use them as general computers would just be painful."

So, "in the end these devices have a niche, just as routers and beagleboards and the pi does, but that niche is NOT general purpose in any way, shape, or form," hairyfeet concluded.

'Opportunities for Specialists'

Chris Travers, a Slashdot blogger who works on the Ledger SMB project, considered the question through the lens of evolutionary ecology.

"In any ecological system an expanding niche allows for differentiation, and a contracting niche requires specialization," Travers pointed out. 'So, for example, if a species of moth undergoes a population explosion, predators of that moth will often specialize and be more picky as to what prey they go after."

The same thing happens with markets, Travers suggested.

"When a market expands, it provides opportunities for specialists, but when it contracts, only the generalists can survive," he told Linux Girl.

'Niche Environments'

The tiny new devices are "replacements for desktop and laptop systems in niche environments," Travers opined.

"In many environments these may be far more capable than traditional systems," he added.

The bottom line, though, "is that the Linux market is growing at a healthy rate," Travers concluded.

'The Right Way to Do IT'

"Moore's Law allows the world to do more with less hardware and so does FLOSS," blogger Robert Pogson told Linux Girl. "It's the right way to do IT rather than paying a bunch for the privilege of running the hardware we own."

Last year was a turning point, Pogson added.

"More people bought small, cheap computers running Linux than that other OS, and the world saw that things were fine without Wintel," he explained. "2012 will bring more of the same." By the end of this year, in fact, "the use of GNU/Linux on small cheap computers doing what we used to do with huge hair-drying Wintel PCs will be mainstream in many places on Earth," Pogson predicted. "In 2012 we will see a major decline in the number of PCs running that other OS. We will see major shelf-space given to Linux PCs at retail."

Via New Scientist

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(Image: Surrey Satellite Technology)

Small satellites capable of docking in orbit could be used as "space building blocks" to create larger spacecraft, says UK firm Surrey Satellite Technology. Not content with putting a smartphone app in space, the company now plans to launch a satellite equipped with a Kinect depth camera, allowing it to locate and join with other nearby satellites.

SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft is the latest of many large-scale vehicles to dock in space, but joining small and low-cost craft has not been attempted before. Surrey Satellite Technology's Strand-2 mission will launch two 30cm-long satellites on the same rocket, then attempt to dock them by using the Kinect sensor to align together in 3D space.

"Once you can launch low cost nanosatellites that dock together, the possibilities are endless - like space building blocks," says project leader Shaun Kenyon. For example, it might be possible to launch the components for a larger spacecraft one piece at a time, then have them automatically assemble in space.

Researchers have also previously suggested that Kinect could calculate the mass of astronauts in zero gravity on board the International Space Station, as traditional scales do not work in orbit.