General > General Technical Chat
One day, a computer will fit on a desk 1974
Homer J Simpson:
jonovid:
to think how we have come from then. and if only dad had then known the true value of a Altair 8800 as I have seen them in old 1970s electronics magazines.
Australia was on the cutting-edge of a lot things computing technology. we had a lot of computer scientists here!
way back in the 1960s, then we lost the lot, by the mid 1980s as japan went ahead of us.
we had a lot of military technology in development too. TOW weapon systems.
a wire-guided anti-tank missile, that worked like a fishing reel from the back of the rocket motor.
jet powered military drones , Unmanned Aerial Targets and other rockets too.
we made AWA weather balloon radiosondes in Melbourne that had two vacuum tubes & worked on 73MHz or was it 71 MHz.
we made our own military vacuum tube type back-pack worky torky radios too, 3 to 15 MHz then there was space tracking stations .
Mr. Scram:
Those predictions were eerily accurate. People take computers for granted, we have desktop computers and we both depend on them way too much and yet also gain freedom from them. Only the terminal was a bit off, although one could argue the cloud model will make that one increasingly true too.
daqq:
One of the funny things I have noticed - in terms of TFLOPS, what you have in your pocket now* was classified as a really good workstation 10 years ago and as a supercomputer 20 years ago.
Yes, I know it's not an accurate comparison, but still, it's interesting.
* - the iPhoneXS claims ~5TFLOPs
KE5FX:
I ran across an interesting assertion in a book by Richard Hamming that I hadn't seen elsewhere:
That was written circa 1997, as far as I can tell, but it's not clear when the equation was modeled. Obviously it isn't from 1943, even if the epoch begins at that point, since the "fastest computer on the market" wasn't a meaningful thing to talk about then.
The 'limiting asymptote' seems pretty close to the reality we'd be stuck with if SIMD and multicore CPUs hadn't come to the rescue.
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