Computer technology is based around gears and wheels - think of the first automatic telephone exchange.<br/><br/>Some heavier reading if you have time is "The Difference Engine" by William Gibson - the father of the Cyberpunk Genre and possible the father of this one too!<br/><br/>As for the difference engine itself:<br/>(http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/images/object_images/535x535/10301732.jpg)<br/><br/>In modern computers, we used to talk about Kilobytes of RAM, then Megabytes. Now it's Giga- and Terabytes. In Gibson's book, the corollary is inches, feet, yards and ultimately<em>miles</em>of gears!