Furby: todays' Apple II?

[cornelio@san.rr.com (L. Cornelio)]

ok, spotted this odd refernce to our machines in the sunday san diego
union, a snip of  which I quoate here from an article there on toy furbys
- furbies?

--quote --

They have ridiculous names like A-Loh, Koh-Koh and Doh-Moh, and their
personalities vary, depending on how they're played with. (A hungry Furby,
for instance, will whine a lot). 

But don't let the fuzzy guy fool you. Furbys aren't just child's play. 

Just ask the National Security Agency. 

It banned Furbys earlier this year from its premises in Maryland. NSA
officials mistakenly thought the fuzz balls had recording devices and would
"start talking classified." Furbys, it turns out, aren't spies. 

"A first-year electronics student could look at the circuit and see that
there's no recording device," said Tiger vice president Jeff Jones. 

For an inexpensive toy, however, it is rather remarkable. 

Beneath that synthetic mane is a computer chip equivalent to that which
powered Apple II computers in the early 1980s. 

Furby has four times the computer processing power and 30 times the
computer memory than the Apollo lunar landing module that put Americans on
the moon, according to Michael Hawley, professor of media technology at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

-end quote-

how 'bout dem apples?

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Louis Cornelio   http://home.san.rr.com/cornelio
Apple II, my classroom and the Ramito Homepage