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From: jtr485@umich.UUCP (Johnathan Tainter)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Processing
Message-ID: <113@umich.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 18-Apr-87 23:55:06 EST
Article-I.D.: umich.113
Posted: Sat Apr 18 23:55:06 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 24-Apr-87 01:17:14 EST
References: <505@sw1e.UUCP> <110@hippo.UUCP> <6123@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <6654@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Organization: EECS, University of Michigan
Lines: 50

In article <6654@bu-cs.BU.EDU>, bzs@bu-cs.UUCP writes:
> 
> No Frank, you misunderstand me. You say "sure we'll need gigaflops, we'll
> need it to do natural language and voice recognition..."
> 
> That's my whole point. We don't know how to do all that and I don't
> believe (completely, trying not to be too dogmatic here) that it's the
> lack of cycles that's holding us back.
No where in his posting did he say that limited cycles was the ONLY thing
holding back these applications.

> I simply mean what I said. That other than the increasingly smaller
> percentage of number crunchers out there (smaller because the computer
> using population is growing [eg. PCs] and not in the cruncher area) we
> won't have applications for the majority of users which will utilize
> all those cycles (remember folks, I'm talking like 100MIPs desktops.)

Even if these applications don't need 100MIPs for themselves, when you have
a voice synthesizer,
a voice input system,
a background music generator,
a video digitizer input system,
a posture monitoring video digitizer system,
an evolving backdrop for your desktop metaphor
and your application running at once you are going to eat mucho processor time.

But, you might say, "Noone would do that!"  And I say, noone will do that
with what we can offer today (i.e. put in lots of special hardware).  But give
them 100MIPS to work with and find out just how much people will do.  Also
find out how much people will demand once they know it can be done.  There
are already people clammering for voice input systems, and those are still
in the toy phase.

There is one more field where mucho processor in a small package is going to
be required.  Robots.  Classic SF style robots, not the misnamed things they
use in factories.  Also prostheses.

Undoubtedly you have heard the axiom
"Any program will expand to fill all available space.".  If you take this for
the obvious analogy to gases then we have a long way to go before the
distribution of programs throughout the available processing space is sparse.
And until we get it sparse we will never get computers to be another
unremarked tool like a doorknob.

Until we eliminate the need for programmers and software designers/engineers
(like me) we have not taken the computer far enough.
No man is doing his job properly unless he is working to make himself obsolete.

> 	-Barry Shein, Boston University
--j.a.tainter