Re: future computers
Dear MISC readers:
"Richard S. Westmoreland" wrote about future computers and
used the computers on StarTrek as reference for a future target.
What I find most interesting about this discussions is that it
is my understand that computers that are considerably smarter
and more powerful than those fictional ones seen in StarTrek
have already been made. Because you can't buy one at your
local store, or read about it in your popular personal
computing consumer magazine people make comparisons between
todays PCs and the fiction computers from the SCI FI future
of StarTrek where they have a vision of where computers
will be in one to three hundred years.
What is funny is that machines that are considerably better
than those fictional machines have already been made. People
have questioned if sci fi has been overly optimistic showing
computers like the Hal 9000 in a futuristic 2001 or
the StarTrek computes from the far distant future but in
fact we have already built machines that have exceeded the
Hal or StarTrek visions.
In MISC we are intersted in consumer versions that we can
build today and not in ones for hundreds of years in the future.
We are interested in making them now, just a matter of funding.
I have commented about this before. Most people seem to
think that if you can't buy it at the local store or
read about it in some computer magazine that it doesn't
exist and that the Cessna you can buy at the corner
store is the state of the art in performance in the
high end of the flying machines. I mean that would be
absurd but no more absurd than the idea that PCs
hold the high ground in computing. You can't build
consumer versions of supersonic flying suits by modeling
a bigger, heavier, more expensive Cessna.
I have also said that one of the fun things about this
project has been making contacts and seeing state of
the art stuff that I didn't think I could ever get
the clearance to see. There are people out there with
funded projects that are quite amazing.
Jeff Fox
