Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!cornell!uw-beaver!apollo!nelson_p@apollo.uucp From: nelson_p@apollo.uucp Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: RE: what to do with all those MIPS Message-ID: <3bbda74b.44e6@apollo.uucp> Date: 28 Apr 88 16:34:00 GMT Sender: user@apollo.uucp Lines: 78 To: comp.society.futures@news One point that has been made on this topic is that we are not just technology-bound in getting more use out of computers. We are so far behind using even the *existing* technology that if hardware development were to be frozen at its current level, major improvements in the use and productivity of computers and related technology would continue for years and perhaps decades. I've been looking over some Compuserve literature with the thought of getting an account. I noticed they offer is an on-line encyclopedia, although it's rather limited in it's capabilities. I would like an on-line encyclopedia where I could look up a topic such as 'Beethoven'. Of course it would supply a biography of him and talk about his impact on music. But it would also supply a picture of him. And perhaps it might mention that his 5th Symphony with its famous opening, 'fate knocking' was penned at a time when Europe was in turmoil due to the Napoleonic wars. Perhaps I would like to see a map of Napoleans's invasion route to see how close Beethoven was to the action at that time. Perhaps I would like to hear the music or get a hard copy of a score. Much other music has been influence by Beethoven's work, from the neoclassical all the way to today's rock, pop, and experimental work. It would be nice to follow this musical path and see where it led. There is no technological reason why this could not be done today over existing phone lines or with existing PC-class computers. The limitations are primarily lack of standards, lack of software, and lack of having the data organized appropri- ately for easy retrieval and cross-referencing. Graphics are one example. Say you wanted to put a picture of the composer in a window in the corner of your screen. If we allowed a 128x128 square for that we would need 16K pixels. It's amazing what a good quality image you can get with even two bits per pixel (black, white, 2 shades of grey). At that resolution it would take 34 seconds to send it at 1200 baud. And less if it were run-length encoded. Line drawings would be even easier. A simple graphics command set consisting of moves, draws, text and maybe filled polygons would allow a drawing of the Beethoven's face or a map of Napoleon's invasion route in a few hundred bytes, which could be sent in a few seconds, about the same time it takes to send a few lines of text. Sound is another example. There are any number of ways that musical notes could be encoded and sent over a 1200 baud link. The quality of the resulting sound would depend on the sophis- tication of the playback hardware the user had. But certainly the ability to make Casio-like sounds, even with chords would be easy and not too expensive. The really critical part is getting all this into the database in the first place. Subjects have to be linked (hypertext-style?) so that it is easy to go from one subject to the next. The graphical information has to be stored in a standard way or in a way that can easily be converted to the appropriate output format. One of the problems that outfits like CIS have is that they get their data from many different sources and try to reduce it to the lowest common denominator, which is ASCII text. I'm not saying that overcoming lack of standards or agreeing on how we want things to work is *easy*. All I'm saying is that, until we do, a lot of neat technology will be very under-utilized. --Peter Nelson PS- I noticed in a recent issue of High Technology magazine that various phone companies around the country are starting to wire up new construction with fiber-optic cable. This will elimnate the bandwidth problems and allow *really* neat sound and graphics. To take advantage of it we'll still need standards, though.