I’ve been fascinated with the Transformers toys for quite a while. Personally, I don’t care about the storyline as much as the notion of recombinance. How are things that perform one function transformed to perform other functions? I’m glad that I worked on a dev team that loved the notion of recombinance. Sometime in mid 1990s, we had a project called InfoImage Objects – which put another layer of Lotus Domino unlike objects together to perform functions – such as headers, footers and even workflow! Imagine putting complex workflow into an application in 20 minutes. We loved it and so did customers! We started working on a patent to do it but dropped it for some reason. (Now? Microsoft or someone involved in InfoImage’s bankruptcy sometime around 2001 owns it.)
Makers definitely embrace the notion of recombinance. Michael Bay does as well, as he is quoted in an interview by the WSJ today. See: http://bit.ly/IpgkF
(The photo above is a Tokima Robot Watch. It came out in the early 80s and was re-released a couple of years ago. I have an original in its box in my watch collection. A happy find.)
