Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!isishq!doug From: doug@isishq.UUCP (Doug Thompson) Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: Re: What to do with all those MIPS Message-ID: <41.2271927F@isishq.UUCP> Date: 24 Apr 88 05:36:43 GMT Organization: FidoNet node 221/162 - ISIS International, Waterloo ON Lines: 85 UN>From: PJS@grouch.JPL.NASA.GOV (Peter Scott) UN>least in UN>those fields. However, it will be interesting to observe the UN>impact of UN>two orders of magnitude improvement in performance for personal UN>computers, UN>and their applications in the home (speech-recognizing vacuum UN>cleaners? UN>Image-processing toasters?) UN> Yeah, I kinda think you're on to something there. The decline in price of computer hardware continues. Micros in the home are coming to have more and more useful and usable computing power. As an example, I am writing this on an IBM AT in my living room. As I write, a uucp mailer is running in the background importing news from a Vax at the university. But I still have enough memory and a spare modem and com port so I can shell out of emacs here and fetch data from one of thousands of computers around the world for which I have phone numbers and log-on scripts. This is a home computer. When the task in the background is not exchanging mail and news with other computers it is open for the general modem owning public to call up and read news, up or download files, or whatever. Again, this is a home computer. While it probably is slightly heavier-duty than the average home computer, with 1Mb RAM and 60Mb hard disk, it is by no means a remarkable or unusual machine. Perhaps the software is remarkable. It is all experimental, beta-test and whatnot, with a tendency toward instability and the odd bug -- but -- it has completely displaced the TV since newsgroups are so much more interesting. And, with access to the library card-catalogue by modem and the IPS news service, it is getting to the point of replacing the newspaper and it has replaced a lot of research hours in the library. As mass storage devices continue to decline in price, and achieve orders of magnitude leaps in cpacity, we are rapidly approaching the point where the entire information economy could be conducted at a computer terminal in the home. Newspapers, books, magazines, television -- all can be delivered on data lines and stored on magentic media and displayed on a graphics monitor. This is the home entertainment centre of the future. But it is a very different sort of home entertainment centre. More than just a recipient of a stream of data, as a TV is, it can store, process sort, correlate that data, and allow you to immediately respond, send and receive mail, pass on interesting documents, or fire off a complaint to the Prime Minister. I suspect that the biggest impact computers will have on society as a whole in the next 25 years will be in transforming the home and the information industry by putting significant computing power in the hands of everyone. It was not very many years ago that Usenet meant a Vax, and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of hardware. Today, it is running on PCs. No hardware revolution brought this about. Indeed, the software is all PD or shareware. As it is perfected and moves beyond beta, the home usenet site may not be all that much of an oddity. Should be great fun! Well, 2 hours of news at 2400 BAUD has arrived, and unbatching has begun. In another 15 minutes it'll be done and I can play with all the newest stuff -- and this message will be fired back out to the net. It doesn't take many MIPs, it takes ingeneous software and a lot of disk space. :-) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fido 1:221/162 -- 1:221/0 280 Phillip St., UUCP: !watmath!isishq!doug Unit B-3-11 Waterloo, Ontario Bitnet: fido@water Canada N2L 3X1 Internet: doug@isishq.math.waterloo.edu (519) 746-5022 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ --- * Origin: ISIS International H.Q. (II) (Opus 1:221/162) SEEN-BY: 221/0 162 172