MIT "Fab Labs"

According to Katharine Dunn in the Boston Globe, MITers think we will eventually have mini-factories at home to produce whatever we feel like. The current prototypes are a long way from nanobots building stuff in the pantry, but ENIAC was a long way from a PC.

Neil Gershenfeld...a physicist and computer scientist who runs the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT, envisions a time when many of us will have a "fabrication center" in our homes. We'll be able to download a description...to our computers, and then feed the designs and the raw materials into a personal fabricator. At the push of a button, almost like hitting "print," the machine will spit it out.

Ultimately, Gershenfeld wants to build a machine that can make any machine -- one that can "print" 3-D objects that include all the circuitry and mechanisms they need to move around, heat up, make noise, connect to the Internet, or do whatever it is they're designed to do. Such a machine -- think of the "replicators" on "Star Trek" -- doesn't yet exist, but Gershenfeld and others say there will be a version of it in a decade.

Clik or paste: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/01/30/how_to_make_almost_anything/

If you are wondering about ENIAC, it was the first electronic computer:

Final assembly took place during the fall of 1945.

...Its thirty separate units, plus power supply and forced-air cooling, weighed over thirty tons. Its 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors consumed almost 200 kilowatts of electrical power.

But ENIAC was the prototype from which most other modern computers evolved. It embodied almost all the components and concepts of today's high- speed, electronic digital computers...

ENIAC could discriminate the sign of a number, compare quantities for equality, add, subtract, multiply, divide, and extract square roots. ENIAC stored a maximum of twenty 10-digit decimal numbers. Its accumulators combined the functions of an adding machine and storage unit. No central memory unit existed, per se.

If you want more, the rest of the above is here:The ENIAC Story By Martin H. Weik, 1961. Ordnance Ballistic Research Laboratories, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD at http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/eniac-story.html