The Marriage of Inventions

摘要

Technologies, like people, form relationships to one another. In the future, new unions will produce surprising offspring.rnIt is eighteenth-century France; Joseph Marie-Jacquard has just invented a mechanical loom that uses punch cards to weave cloth in a set pattern, a device that-when eventually combined with electronics-will lead to the invention of the PC. Two hundred fifty years later, the tech bubble pops, sending the prices of overhyped computer and Internet companies tumbling.