Paul Jacobson

There are two items which could take you right down memory lane.  First up, Christie's has an auction titled "The Origins of Cyberspace: A Library on the History of Computing, Networking & Telecommunications" which features a range of items from computing antiquity:

Highlights include:

•  Edmund C. Berkeley's Giant brains or machines that think

•  Karel Capek's R.U.R. Rossum's universal robots
•  Joseph Marie Jacquard's manuscript on the Jacquard loom
•  Claude E. Shannon's "A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits"
•  Alan Mathison Turing's "On computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem"
•  Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine
•  The UNIVAC Short Code
•  J. Presper and John Mauchly's "Outline of plans for development of electronic computers"
For further information about The Origins of Cyberspace Library and to view the reference catalogue, please visit www.historyofscience.com.

For something more recent, head over to Mobile PC for the "Top 100 Gadgets of All Time".

Whether they're strapped to our belts, sitting on our desks, or jammed in an overstuffed closet, we absolutely love our gadgets.

So it wasn't exactly easy coming up with the definitive list of the 100 best gadgets ever unleashed. In the weeks we spent debating the entries, tempers were flared, fingers were pointed, chairs were smashed over heads, and feelings were hurt. But we emerged, like Moses from the mountain, with the world's most authoritative ranking of the best gadgets of all time.