The Pyramid acts as a home base and remote control unit for the Orbit and features a custom-designed, reprogrammable micro-controller.

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Unless you fancy using three different machines to run Word, Excel and PowerPoint, give credit to the fathers of Eniac, the first reprogrammable computer: John Mauchly, Presper Eckert and John von Neumann.

FORBES: Yet another look

John Atanasoff's computer was digital, but not reprogrammable.

FORBES: Yet another look

Still, that is cold comfort for the backers of products such as the iCache Geode, a strange and ambitious iPhone contraption combining NFC and e-paper with a reprogrammable credit card that was floated last April.

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