Technical questions

Theemile wrote:I have a picture from the 1954 Popular Mechanics showing a mockup of supposed "home computer" from the 2000s. The image bares more in common with a nuclear reactor's control room than an IBM PC - the computer being the size of a large living room, with the walls covered in banks of dials.

[snip]

And the article mentioned that many breakthroughs in miniaturization would be required for the concept to be practical.

And Yet many more happened, as we know and continued to happen - now virtually everyone holds hundreds of thousands of times the computing power of an 80s PC in our pocket. I don't think the PM writer could have considered that.

In one of the First Star Trek the Next Generation Episodes, it was mentioned that the entire ship had 4 Teraquads of computer storage - assuming a "quad" is 2 binary bits, that's 8 terabit. I just built a gaming machine with 20 Terabytes of storage (4 x 2TB NVME drives, and a 12TB HDD data drive.). I know that it was just writers on a show saying that in the fall of 1987, but that was an insane number to a PC geek whose PC had a hideously expensive 40MB HD.

Technology has made those #s and designs seem pathetic. In another 50 years, hat will be made possible due to unforeseen breakthroughs?

Jonathan_S wrote:

Theemile wrote:I have a picture from the 1954 Popular Mechanics showing a mockup of supposed "home computer" from the 2000s. The image bares more in common with a nuclear reactor's control room than an IBM PC - the computer being the size of a large living room, with the walls covered in banks of dials.

[snip]

And the article mentioned that many breakthroughs in miniaturization would be required for the concept to be practical.

And Yet many more happened, as we know and continued to happen - now virtually everyone holds hundreds of thousands of times the computing power of an 80s PC in our pocket. I don't think the PM writer could have considered that.

In one of the First Star Trek the Next Generation Episodes, it was mentioned that the entire ship had 4 Teraquads of computer storage - assuming a "quad" is 2 binary bits, that's 8 terabit. I just built a gaming machine with 20 Terabytes of storage (4 x 2TB NVME drives, and a 12TB HDD data drive.). I know that it was just writers on a show saying that in the fall of 1987, but that was an insane number to a PC geek whose PC had a hideously expensive 40MB HD.

Technology has made those #s and designs seem pathetic. In another 50 years, hat will be made possible due to unforeseen breakthroughs?

I forget the unfathomably large specs that Heinlein gave the Mycroft computer in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (okay, looked it up, and it wasn't as bad as I remembered. The unused memory bank Mycroft was able to lock aside for private use of him and Mannie is "Ten-to-the-eighth-bits capacity"; or, as we'd know it, 12.5 megabytes. OTOH when Heinlein defined the capacity at which Mycroft "woke up" he did a bit better job, describing "banks of associated neural nets" and saying Mycroft had more than "one and a half times ["ten-to-the-tenth"] neuristors".

That'd be over 15 billion; which compares not so unfavorable to the very largest modern neural net, GPT-3 at 175 billion parameters (only a bit over 11 times larger) -- though obviously that mere size didn't make GPT wake up.

Still at least 15 billion parameter neural net isn't as laughably out of place as a computer in 2075 having any spare memory bank of as small as just 12.5 MB.

Daryl wrote:There was an Asimov short story that had a world beating spaceship, that actually managed to fit a computer into itself, albeit with sacrificing much else.
In 1969 I was researching phase diagrams in molten metals. Basically trying to map what happened when melting various metals to make various versions of brass and bronze.
Gained overnight access to one of the two mainframes in the state, programmed it with punchcards in Fortran. Eventually we gave up as the valves in the mainframe had an average failure rate that killed it before we could generate the graphs.
Many years later I found my notes, typed it into Excel on my desktop, tapped a key and they were there before I blinked.