One of the most interesting aspects of corporate history is the development of interoffice communication. After the skyscraper was invented in the early 20th century, large companies began to occupy increasingly spread-out places. That meant they had to rely on increasingly complex ways to move messages around -- including pneumatic-tube systems, speaker-tube grids, and wax-cylinder recorders.
Joking aside, the inventor here actually made one interesting breakthrough. He quickly realized that any guidance-control system would be too heavy for the blimp to lift, so he made the blimp "dumb". The control systems are in the room around it: A set of video cameras tracks the movement, calculates the vectors in which the blimp needs to fire its engines to reach its destination, and squirts the commands over to the balloon. This system means you could conceivably roll out a pretty big fleet of blimps pretty quickly, since it would only take one "brain" to route them all.
The inventor notes that when his blimp project was mentioned on Slashdot last month, he was beseiged with resumes from geeks who wanted to apply for jobs on Hewlett Packard's "blimp team." Heh.
Posted by Clive Thompson at October 09, 2003 01:07 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt3/mt-tb.cgi/582
Nice site. thx.
Posted by: Online Casino at January 16, 2004 4:34 PM
Posted by: julia at January 24, 2004 9:46 PM