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The first call from a cell phone was made 40 years ago today

Martin Cooper changed the world when he made the first cell phone call 40 years ago.

The former Motorola vice president and division manager made the call on the company's DynaTAC phone while standing in front of the New York Hilton on Sixth Avenue. His first call: to the head of research at Bell Labs, a company that also was attempting to build the first cell phone.

Cooper's call did more than untether people from their fixed phone lines; it opened the door to true mobility and continues to affect virtually every aspect of our lives. … Read more

iPhone 5 weighs 3.95 ounces. The DynaTac was 2.5 pounds

Whether you're heavily panting over the iPhone 5 or you're a Samsung super fan, you can probably appreciate all cell phones after watching these videos.

AdAge went to YouTube to dig up a Radio Shack commercial from 1989. The consumer electronics chain was advertising a "powerful transportable cellular phone system" for $799.

The device required an owner to carry a unit the size of a phone book around with them. But for the time, the technology was cutting edge.

Mobile phones were very expensive back then. Remember, those were 1989 dollars. I found another Radio Shack … Read more

Perhaps it should be called Cut the Web

In Greedy Spiders, your job is to rescue helpless flies being hunted by one or sometimes several hungry arachnids. Each fly is thoroughly trapped in web, but with a simple tap of your finger you're able to cut individual strands to eventually free them all. The problem is, every time you make a move, the spiders get to make one, inching themselves progressively closer to their prey.

To start, you get to cut a single strand of web per turn. A good strategy is to either snip near the spider to cut off its route, or snip one of … Read more

iRobot gets single biggest order from Army

Best known for its Roomba vacuums, iRobot also counts the U.S. Army as a top customer. And the latest Army deal is the company's single biggest.

iRobot said Tuesday it has received an order from the U.S. Army for $35.3 million for robots equipped to help soldiers safely evaluate dangerous conditions.

The order, made by the U.S. Army TACOM Contracting Center in Warren, Mich., calls for 486 iRobot PackBot 510 with FasTac Kit robots by March 31, 2010. This single order is part of an overall larger contract worth $286 million, of which $125 million … Read more

Magellan Navigation sold to MiTAC

On Monday, Magellan Navigation Inc., entered into a definitive agreement to sell its consumer products division to Taiwanese-based MiTAC International Corporation and expects the transaction to be finalized by January 2009, though no specifics were given about the financial terms. As part of the package, MiTAC, which also owns Mio Technology, makers of the Mio Knight Rider GPS and the the Mio C520, will inherit the Magellan RoadMate and Maestro series of portable navigation devices and the Triton series of handheld GPS.

Though Magellan still has a decent retail presence in the United States and comes in third to Garmin … Read more

Dell brings up the 80-core chip

A Dell slide shown Tuesday was a reminder that a future 80-core processor is still in sight.

Flash back two years to the Intel Developer Forum when CEO Paul Otellini pledged to deliver an 80-core processor in five years.

Otellini said at the time that the chips will be capable of exchanging data at a terabyte a second and that the company hopes to have these chips ready for commercial production within a five-year window.

Michael Dell referred to a slide showing an 80-core chip Tuesday at SC08, a conference in Austin, Texas, focused on high-performance computing.

The trend of … Read more

Dell taps game box, Nvidia for supercomputing

Democratize IT. A banal catch phrase until you see off-the-shelf gaming boxes from PC maker Dell being used for visual supercomputing.

CEO Michael Dell showed the "Stallion" Visualization Cluster at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) running on standard Dell XPS gaming machines during his keynote Tuesday at SC08, a conference in Austin, Texas, focused on high-performance computing. (The keynote was streamed over the Web.)

The Stallion "visualization wall" uses XPS boxes to power 30-inch Dell displays. "The largest display of its kind in the world, at 307 million pixels," Michael Dell said.

"… Read more