Post your computer-related inventions here!

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This thread is for any invention, hardware or software that you thought of. I'll start:
Free hard-drive space: there are lots of free online services that offer free disk space, such as all email services and web-hostings. My idea is to write a program that registers on all those sites at once, and puts them mirror-of-stripes RAID array that can be mounted as a virtual disk. The mirror part will protect your data in case one of the sites bans you, goes bankrupt, or is hacked; the stripe part will increase your access speed. This will only work for fast internet users, though.

That's a good idea for really critical data. I have books in progress that I E-mail back and forth to myself to have multiple backups.

oh where to start.
when i got my first soldering iron, i wired an old NES joystick to the parallel port on my comp though an old printer cord. I wrote a program to figure out witch pins where connected or not, and use it to do things. I used it to control and click the mouse, to control winamp. this was when i first hooked my comp upto my TV, before media centre came out. i had wrote a basic media centre controlled by my NES joystick. it was so awesome
as for software, i made this beauty:

a fully functional Yahoo! chat client (well it was fully functional a few years ago. yahoo changed a LOT sense then)
and uploading that screen, reminded me of this site i made:
http://www.rapidrip.com/
any1 who uses warez forums and rapidshare may have found it useful a few months ago. now i cant keep it up because it puts too much load on the servers.

Here's one which I thought up in the late '80s, and it's never going to happen, so what the heck, might as well put it into the public domain...

Trinary computing. If you look at a lot of analog circuits, say a power amplifier, they can produce outputs which are both positive and negative. They do this using some transistors which work between a positive voltage and 0, and others which work between negative voltages and 0. Digital circuitry has never done that, so it has always been limited to a positive voltage (1) or no voltage (0).

Trinary chips would be significantly more complicated to design and make, but the tradeoffs have some appeal. A byte would no longer be limited to numbers from 0 to 255, you could fit 0 to 6560 into a trinary byte. And there would probably never be a need for a 64-bit CPU, 3^32 is 1.85 quadrillion, which is a bigger number than a 50-bit binary integer -- resulting in an increase in processing speed of 50%, all else being equal.

But everybody in the industry would have to adjust, and stop thinking in powers of 2, which will never happen. It's interesting to think about, though.

that is interesting but boolean logic is all about true or false, 1 or 0, yes or no.

how could AND, OR, XOR, NOT, etc operators work? u would need new ones that input three bytes to add to these.

I am thinking about building a darlington pair keyboard.

As for "trinary" versus "ternary," I realize that I'm in the minority, but both are used, and there's no clearcut winner if you check the dictionary, they're synoymous. This page might interest you, someone who is very into t*nary, and even likes triINTERCAL: http://xyzzy.freeshell.org/trinary/

Although I see that I have definitely missed the boat, some don't seem to think I missed it by that much, a 2003 paper I just found, called "Multiple-Valued Logic Architectures and Circuits," says "A 64-tert SRAM and a 4-tert adder have been designed and fabricated at UCL. These two circuits represent the very first full-ternary circuit ever fabricated." The only other candidate seems to have been one called Setun, of which there were 50 made in the USSR in the 1950s. Thomas Fowler made a t*nary wooden calculator in the 1840s, but no circuitry involved, obviously.

Although Setun was very likely a valve-based system, I'm not clear on how that would help in making a t*nary system, since a triode is virtually identical in function to a single CMOS transistor or other FET -- the valve's grid is replaced by the transistor's base, etc., from my perspective. Would you mind elaborating? You've got me curious, now.

here's my software.. http://www.pidog.com