When will a computer manufacturer incorporate the capacitor reverse-engineered by American Computer Company (ACC)? It is a switching device with molecular size, one 15,000th of the power requirements of a transistor. It absorbs its own heat, and switches in terahertz. It is in production and BT has received 2,000 chips. That would make a Cray into the size of a credit card! I am tired of lugging my three kilogram 'lightweight' around the planet, and I don't want to upgrade every time a new model is two ounces lighter, and a little faster. The capacitor, according to ACC, was reverse-engineered from the 1947 Roswell crash. Science fiction? If this is hard to swallow, then from where did the transistor, fibre optics, microprocessor and laser suddenly appear in 1947, all about 200 years ahead of our then technology? See the ACC site before you dismiss this as science fiction or a frivolous letter. Read about what the scientist who 'discovered' the transistor in Bell Labs was working on at that time, miniaturising vacuum tubes, and his limited scientific background.
TOM TURK
Hong Kong
There is a simple answer to this one - don't believe everything you read online. Messages about the American Computer Company (ACC) and its secret alien research have been around for four years. In 1997, Jack Shulman, the owner of ACC (now operating as Compamerica.com), posted a story to his Web site. He claimed that Bell Telephone Laboratories had stolen the idea for the silicon chip from the alien spacecraft that supposedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Prior to Bell's announcement that year that John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley had invented the transistor, computing had depended on vacuum tubes. So why is it that 50 years on, we can't use the alien's technologies to 'violate the theory of relativity to travel beyond light speed'? It seems that a cartel of technology companies and oil producers has colluded to prevent the development of high-speed chips. Mr Shulman posts his theories at roswellinternet.com, where he also claims to have invented PCs and Windows, and to be working on a chip that will run at 12 terahertz - a thousand times the speed of today's fastest CPUs. One way that you can guess the veracity of a Web rumour is the writer's typing style. If an author randomly SWITCHES TO UPPER CASE for effect, then he's PROBABLY a crank. The Web should be treated with a healthy dose of scepticism. Don't be fooled by the paranoids, and remember, the truth is out there.