The outfit just introduced a pair of touch-friendly, Win 8-ready all-in-one desktops, the 23-inch Aspire 5600U and the 27-inch Aspire 7600U. As you can see in the press shots, the design here is fairly minimal, with an edge-to-edge display, a transparent panel at the bottom of the bezel and a thin frame measuring less than 1.4 inches thick.

ENGADGET: Acer announces Aspire 5600U and 7600U all-in-ones, coming this month for $1,000 and up

The Monadnock is a good place to get a practical sense of how quickly these innovations were catching on: the original northern half of the building consists of traditional load-bearing walls that are 6ft thick at the bottom, while the southern half, constructed only two years later, uses the then-revolutionary metal frame for drastically thinner walls that go just as high.

BBC: The infamous architecture of Chicago