Month: February 2003

Bruce Sterling: Furoshiki Revisited

This article by Blather's Dave Walsh first appeared in The Irish Times of Monday, July 23, 2001, as PCs are the fabric of life '"I've never seen on these furoshiki." Maya leaned over the table. "I've certainly heard of them..." The intelligent cloth was woven from a dense matrix of fibre-optic threads, organic circuitry and piezoelastic fibre.The hair-thin optical threads oozed miniscule screen-line pixels of coloured light. A woven display screen. A flexible all-fabric computer.' - Bruce Sterling, Holy Fire Just eight years ago, in 1993, the average Westerner had never heard of the Internet, much less shown a desire to own a home PC. Back then, the idea of widespread Internet use seemed as crazy as having human moon-dwellers by 1999. We're now half-way through 2001, millions of us are "jacked into the matrix" - to use the parlance of early 1990s cyberpunk literature - but Martin Landau and...