Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!tada
From: tada@athena.mit.edu (Michael Zehr)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: what to do with all those MIPS
Message-ID: <5157@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 6 May 88 18:45:56 GMT
References: <3bbda74b.44e6@apollo.uucp| <15368@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> <23924@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: tada@athena.mit.edu (Michael Zehr)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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I think the problem is much more complicated than "your hardware is
slowing down my software" or "you software isn't using my hardware."
There are distributed processing systems in which a big slowdown on
compute-intensive processes is network delays (paging a file, waiting
for data, etc).  On the other hand, if 90% of the time the people on
the system are using the machines as fancy typewriters, then who
cares?  They're wasting computrons (CPU cycles) left and right.

One can say that given a 1 GIPS (gillion instructions per second)
machine you can use up all those computrons with a great interactive
interface that will increase programmer efficiency many times, and
the code they generate will still run fast.  On the other hand, you
could use today's hardware and write better languages that will give
the development speed of a 4th generation language with the run-time
performance of a language like C.  

If we really want to see improvements in the way we use computing
power, then we have to continue to improve hardware (my guess would be
that faster networks are one of the top priorities) while improving
software as well.  The idea of throwing computrons at a user interface
until it's fast enough isn't the solution.

michael j zehr
@insert(standard_disclaimer)