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Computer Expectations of Today, and a Decade Hence?
Luciq asks: "The other day I was cleaning out my closet and started reminiscing about all the good times I had with my 33Mhz 486DX. I got the machine 10 years ago just as the first Pentiums were coming out. With a 33Mhz processor, 212MB hard drive and a whopping 8MB of RAM, I could surf the net at 2400 baud, manipulate photos and even play games with full-screen video like The Seventh Guest. Today I use an Athlon XP 2400, 80GB HD, 512MB [not 512K!] RAM. While I can do some neat things with it, I must say that it's fallen short of the wonderous expectations I had for such a system in 1993 (no immersive VR?, no seamless voice recognition?). What expectations did you have for today's PC, 10 years ago and how does the reality match up? What do you expect from computing, 10 years from now?"
Every home will be eqquiped with a computer that contains SUPER PORN.. The files will have "Touch Abilities." Geek nation wide will contibute to this open source project to customize there own porn star..
Today I use an Athlon XP 2400, 80GB HD, 512K RAM.
Even after 10 years, 640K is *STILL* enough for anybody!
- Sometimes you're the pidgeon, sometimes you're the statue.
i expect everything work right,
and not be asked for a damn windows patch by all my friends every 5 freakin minutes
I got my wish. I installed linux. :)
A stable, secure, low-cruft OS.
Maybe in the next ten years.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
10 years ago I expected some truly breath-taking an immersive 3D games with excellent gameplay for the present. However, I often times find that today's games are simply breath-taking in a graphical sense but really lack in the gameplay. Am I just spoiled or does anyone else feel this way? Maybe it's just that I'm remembering my childhood playing those side scroller games for hours.
My sig can beat up your sig.
I expect (hope?) that text-to-speech will start sounding natural in 10 years. I'm sick and tired of the bland TTS that still sounds like it did in the '70s. Here's hoping. :)
- OLED displays that are like paper (thin and flexible)
;).
- fuel cell batteries that provide power for quite a bit longer
- 64 bit computing (arriving now - wonder what the next step would be - 128 bit?)
- Windows to require 30 terabytes of disk space
I hope somebody invents a better mouse (or whatever it might be called)
I also wonder if we'll still be using hard disks ten years from now.
John Kerry is a Joke!
I wont make what seems to be the required 512K joke, come on people you never had a typo?
But I will say that my expectations for computer hardware at this point was pretty much exceeded. The fact that I now have about 10 times as much Ram as my first computers had harddrive space I am impressed. However, since you mentioned games within the post I'll reply that my expectation for how FUN games would be at this time was sorely underachieved.
Unfortunately, the pixel pushing hogs that are modern computers have left game design to rely on the next brightest nicest looking graphical engine with most games being "unique" like all others on the market.
It's not the technology I feel let down about, its the basic design for games which for the most part has not advance nor drastically changed in 10 years really.
-Bort
10 years ago I thought about how a computer was still like a keyboard with a TV (and a mouse). I expected better input technologies. Why do I have to move the mouse pointer with my hand? Why can't I guide it with my eyes, just looking around the screen and moving the pointer? Why are input devices so far behind anything else?
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
This article is only a few minutes old and everyone is flaming poor Liciq for saying KB instead of MB. C'mon now, let's grant him a full Slashdot pardon. I mean, it's not like his mixing of MB and KB crashed a Mars lander or something, like NASA's mixing of metric/US measurements did. ;)
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
1. Be really small and run on almost no power. (Screw 70 Watt processors, gimme something i can implant!) 2. Automatically negotiate ad hoc networks with passersby, immediately establishing whether or not they are similar or dissimilar to you based on MP3 collections, web bookmarks, etc. 3. Thereby facilitating a new form of social selection in humans, whereby our computers automatically figure out whether we are meant to fall in love, be friends, etc.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
Today I expect a PC that can play 3D games without hiccuping, display complex text and graphics and manipulate them in real-time, allow me to surf the 'Net at speeds that make my old 14.4 modem pale in comparison. I also, unfortunately, expect a system that is much less stable than what I had ten years ago. I expect the systems of today to require an enormous heat sink and a fan with an alarm and auto-shutdown on overheat function. I never needed this with my older systems.
In the next ten years I expect that the heat issue may still be around, but that the solutions will be quiet and won't require near-constant maintenance. I expect that there will be true 3D displays, along with OSes that utilize all that goes along with them. The "personal" in PC may go the way of Dodo with all the connected world has brought us. Although most of us will certainly have, need, or require local storage of some sort, it will most likely do little or no processing of it's own. I hope that I will have the choice to disconnect at the end of the day, but am not sure this will be so as the government and big business seems to need to know every little thing we do.
My biggest expectation for the future is that I will be surprised. That there will be something I want or need my system to do that I can't even imagine today.
If Darwin was right, you'd be dead by now.
Life will start looking more like it did in the middle of the last century, as computers disappear from sight and banal old devices start containing little bits of a massively distributed system.
I won't miss sitting at a keyboard and staring fixedly at a monitor, that's for sure.
A decade ago or so, I saw this fortune:
It was funny at the time. Those specs were ridiculous!
Today I've got a 200MHz+ Zaurus with 64MB of RAM builtin, plus about 512MB worth of CF cards. And you can get 1-2GB CF microdrives. And it costs about $300.
It's like "Unix! I know this!" line from Jurassic Park... reality caught up, and it's not funny anymore. :-( ;-)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
...90% of hardware improvements are essentially wasted by programmer inefficiency.
Look at those amazing 4K demos that people did (and stll do) for DOS. People are doing wild stuff here-- things like real-time pseudo-3D rendering, fractals, you name it-- all inside of 4 kilobytes of code. And most of these demos will run just as well on a '286 or (at most) '386 than today's space-heater chips.
Contiki is a lovely example of what can be done with efficient coding. In my experience, this sort of efficiency is NEVER achieved today in "commercial" projects or even in OSS/FS code-- people never even come close. The only areas of computing which have seen significant improvements (I don't just mean "more widgets" or "better interfaces" (the latter has nothing to do with hardware improvements, so don't even mention it)) in recent years have been:
* Gaming (perhaps the only area where efficiency is even SOMEWHAT appreciated, as it leads to higher FPS)
* Rendering (ditto)
* Real-time scientific simulations
In 1980, I could flip on an Apple II and have a usable prompt inside of a second or two. Nowadays, even with a screamin' P4 or Duron will get you a 30-second startup time-- if you're lucky. That's just to boot up the OS. Wanna start a word processor? That'll take even longer.
If you want to get a sense of what MY expectations were that were shattered, go grab a good Apple II emulator and some appropriate software and fire the emulator up. Make sure that it's running at the full possible speed-- not "compatible" speed (which is 1.02MHz, if I remember correctly). Look at how fast stuff runs... and that's in emulation. Sure, there's no fancy GUI, there's no clippy, whatever you think "modern" OSes have to have... but the point is that even in emulation, old stuff runs REALLY, REALLY FAST. If the same mentality of "efficiency is everything" that was necessary during the days of limited hardware power was voluntarily adopted today... well... imagine Windows XP starting up in one second (and not crashing). Imagine being able to swap cool new games on floppy disks. Imagine most games being distributed on Mini CDs, even those with lots of videos and speech, since a full (650-700MB) CD would be overkill for them.
Then wake up and realize it's time to go buy some more RAM again... ho hum...BillG just raised the bar on hardware requirements. Back to the treadmill we go...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
That's what I believed the future could hold for me at the time. Now I'm typing from a gorgeous little Powerbook with built-in DVD writer, which is wirelessly remote desktop-connected to an XP-based 2.4Ghz PC with a DVD rewriter in it, 1 Gig of RAM and a 120Gig hard drive. That's not even considered a top-end system anymore. Peripherals I connect include a firewire video cameras, bluetooth phone, a scanner, an iPod which stores more than supercomputers used to at the time of my C64 dream...all very nice toys. The above systems also have a broadband link out to the internet. Given all the above, I have to say that personal computing (small 'p', small 'c') has surpassed my expectations by a long, long way.
Oh, and the C64? I have the system I wanted, leaving aside the acoustic coupler. Of course, it's an emulated system. I carry it around installed on my phone...
Cheers,
Ian
It needs to make a comeback. I have a 2.4ghz box sitting under my desk, but would be delighted if Intel made a commitment to bring back the turbo button.
Push it, and you have successfully doubled the speed to 4.8ghz. That's the kind of innovation computer industry needs. Forget complicated overclocking.
from my experience, computer technology is mostly driven by computer games.
anyone can still type up a letter using an old computer. science/research are adapting to what's currently available, rather than creating the needs, but i might be wrong.
on the other hand, not many game developers are still writing games for the current computers, instead, manufacturers are trying to come out with something so that their consumers can finally play GTA3 smoothly.
so a question to answer your question - what do you expect to see in computer games in the future.
Hey, one can dream, right? That and I'd like to see those diamond semiconducters with solid state nanostorage. That and Duke Nukem Forever.
Hate me!
I got my first computer when I went to college (1995). I shelled out a ton for it, too. $3000 for a Pentium 133, 32MB RAM, you know the story...
I sit here, typing code on a 2400+ XP, 512Mb RAM and you know, the saddest part is that I'm still the slowest component of the computer. Sure, code compiles faster, but that's only a few moments compared to the hours I spend hitting keys.
It seems that hardware is just keeping up with the software that keeps bogging it down. Sure, my windows desktop is a '32-bit' blue rather than that sad '256 colors' blue. It's still the default color.
I wished that we had truly-emmersive 3D desktops. The kind where you can stack desktops on top of each other and you could control the mouse in 3 dimensions.
I wished that messages from the computer would be synthesized in a super-sexy voice. I wanted a holographic (Max Headroom-ish) interface that I could talk to. I wanted hot-swappable PCI devices.
I remember voice-recognition was just on the verge of becoming commonplace. I think it still is. Perhaps a vapor-ware award is in order...
Here is my pre-emptive response to all of the pro-status-quo zealots (yes, the most annoying sort of all, contrary to a recent poll).
Let's say you had a time machine. (Let's say it was built out of a DeLorean, just for fun's sakes.)
So you fire up your DMC chariot, head back to 1965, and pick up some computer scientists.
You then take them back to the present and start showing them things.
After they get past the whole "You elected RONALD REAGAN President!?" bit, they'll probably faint dead away when you tell them about modern computers. "WHAT? The system REQUIRES 64MB of memory to boot!!!??? And 128MB is recommended!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?" At this point, they would probably punch you in the face, and tell you how much of a failure the modern computer world is (by virtue of being the most prodigious waste of perfectly good supercomputing hardware conceivable... short of using all the world's hardware to render an animated video of Britney Spears's assets bouncing... using a renderer written in BASIC, of course.)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I would have KILLED for this system ten years ago. Correction, I wouldn't have imagined this much power, speed, and functionality in such a tiny, yet solid system. Ten years ago I was using a big clunky desktop PC, with a 14-inch CRT monitor, Windows 3-something, Prodigy dial-up to get to a kludgy graphical system where you could read about six lines of text on the screen and the amount of information was very limited, everything was wired together to form a basic ethernet network with lots of hoops to jump through to get it to work seamlessly. I think we had available for the entire department some $5K Toshiba laptop that was also clunky, and heavy, and ran the same lame OS with the same lame limitations.
Now I'm using this aluminum wonder to wireless connect to my broadband, always-on, super fast connection, while watching TV in the living room, a Terminal window open to let me do command line stuff in BSD, while using a super fun, super smooth OS X system that makes Windows 3 look like a torture device.
Speed, power, slickness, functionalty...you couldn't pay me to go back to what I was using ten years ago. Personally I can't wait to see what I'll be using ten years from now. Gripe all you want, but I think things have gotten waaaaaaaaay better in the last ten years.
always seems to be the case, my expectations for 2013 are as follows:
- Computers will be much, much faster
- Operating systems will be much, much more bloated
- Our demands will have gone up
- Mozilla will have become sentient, and will be its own project maintainer
And the end result will be roughly the same. Except that last part, that will be new.
Alpha-blending at the OS-level will be not just standard equipment, but nearly required. Games will be more beautiful, but will come on 3 DVDs and take 3 or 4 minutes to load up, giving about 30-50 FPS on a "fast" machine. (Seriously, load up UT2K3 on a "fast" machine, it looks nice but is very slow...)
The video card will be about the size of the motherboard, and will require more cooling than the CPU. Audio cards will come with fans (if that sounds weird, what if I told you, in 1993, about fans on video cards, water-cooling, or heat-spreaders on RAM modules? Case-mods, LED-fans,
We'll keep hearing about how magnetic media is coming to an end, reaching the end of Moore's law, even while Maxtor is releasing 4.5 TB disk drives, and Seagate (among others) announces a new standard to replace the SATA that we'll have all become quite familiar with.
Video capture/tuner cards will be standard equipment (like audio today), and maybe -- just maybe -- by then we'll have some kind of industry standard on digital broadcast (cable/sattelite). Eh, probably not...
IMO anyway.
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
Writing very complex software means that you can't write it in Assembly and hope to be done in the next 10 years. Sorry to burst your bubble.
...90% of hardware improvements are essentially wasted by programmer inefficiency.
.Net. Byte code/virtual machines eliminate the need to port our application 50 times, but in trade we give up a whole bunch of speed. If speed doesn't matter, it's all upside.
While this may be true, it's largely done on purpose.
Professional programmers are in the business of making tradeoffs: time versus space, speed of execution versus speed of development, etc.
While it's true that a crack team of assembly programmers could probably rewrite the whole of MS Office for optimum performance, chances are:
1) It would take them years.
2) Users would hardly notice a difference ("Wow, the about box comes up in 100 ms instead of 500!")
3) The code would be impossible to maintain.
Nowadays, professional programmers who are working on performance-critial software tend to write first and optimize second (after they profile the code to determine where 'hotspots' are).
Just look at 'write-once-run-anyware' languages like Java or
While I'm in full agreement that today's programs are much fatter than those of 10 or 20 years ago, and I'll bravely resist the temptation to point fingers at Microsoft, I should point out that larger, slower programs are not necessarily a bad thing. Yes, you could get a prompt in a couple of seconds on an Apple II, Atari 400 (my personal favorite), or whatnot, but you couldn't run multiple programs at once, do filesystem operations with a mouse, etc. It takes more resources to accomplish more things, and technology hasn't necessarily been keeping up with that curve. (Though granted, there is far too much gratuitous bloat around--a minimal Linux system I keep on hand can boot in 2 seconds on a machine that takes 40 seconds to get through the BIOS startup...)
The other thing that should be done with the current level of technology, and regrettably rarely is done, is adding robustness. Array bounds checking, input sanity checking, the works. Except in very specialized cases, we have more than enough CPU power around to actually check all these things and still get done what needs to be done in a reasonable amount of time (as in, less than the user will notice). Instead of assuming that a function's inputs will be within range, check that they are in range, and take some sort of error action if not, rather than blowing away random areas of memory or the like. I get frustrated every time I see people saying "extra checks are inefficient and a waste of resources" (though admittedly I was of the same mind until recently). What else are you going to do with all those spare cycles? Twiddle your thumbs?
10 years ago I was fiddling with autoexec.bat and config.sys files so I could play some game I just bought from Babbage's. Using your computer as an entrainment device, aside from gaming never went beyond some .mod or .wav file, and short video clips -- usually as filler in some "multimedia' game.
Things have gotten bigger, but not necessarily better. Now instead of well-thought out games, there's a ton of 3d animation and filler. Instead of the fun conversations on IRC and BBS's, there's spam filled usenet and E-Mail.
Ease of use hasn't drastically occurred -- because face it, nerds (who develop software) always turned their noses up at "the easy way" of doing things. Which is why the kids with Macs and Amigas got made fun of. The real thing the nerds were hating in the GUI was the inability to get under the hood.
10 years ago I couldn't have imagined downloading full music files and movies so easily, or creating your own with a few hundred dollars worth of equipment. Even getting your own home network going is insanely cheap nowadays.
I don't know about everyone else, but I'm pretty happy with how things have gone. What I didn't anticipate was how much Microsoft would totally dominate, and ruin computing. If I could have seen that then, maybe I would have bought a Mac in 1993, not another PC. Apple has flaws, but I just can't see them contaminating the Internet the same way Windows users and Microsoft has.
I'm happy to see the open source movement making waves, and 10 years ago I wouldn't have imagined a free OS could provide so many options. Nowadays your average cable modem provides the kind of bandwidth many universities had . . . I never would've imagined that 10 years ago.
Of course, the things I was doing in 1993 (using IRC to chat, looking at web pages, sending E-Mails), I'm still doing now. Except, with IE's non-compliance to standards and Windows viruses, it's actually worse than it was 10 years ago.
Saying all that, I love what Linux and BSDs offer for free alternatives -- a few of my computers are running Linux right now. As far as being completely satisfied though, OS X is exactly what I wanted in a computer 10 years ago. It's easy enough to deal with, stable, and I can get tinker with UNIX whenever I need to. I really became disinterested in computers from 95-98 or so; OS X is what made me buy a few programming books and get back into things though.
What sucks in 2003 is Microsoft and people not following standards on the web. DRM applies here too. A lot of really great things have happened in 10 years, what's held them back is MS dominance.
I think they would be rather amazed at the power of the computers themselves. Show them that we can store 2 trillion bits of data on something thats about the size of a paperback book. Oh yeah, and it only costs about $200 too. However, they may not be so impressed when they discover we use it mostly to store vast quantities of bad music, bad movies, and porn. Oh well.
Or the processors that run at 2 billion cycles per second that cost less than $100. It would blow them away.
You can tell them, "Sure, the thing won't boot with less than 64MB of memory, but who cares when that much memory costs $15?" Oh course they will probably say that's our problem - what incentive do we have to elimate bloat when it's so much cheaper to throw more hardware at a problem?
BTW, be sure to tell them to put all their money into the stock of a small company named "Microsoft" in the early 1980's, and that around 1999 you'll be expecting a nice check in the mail.
grib.
maybe
Ten years ago: I thought some of the titanic applications I was working on would be re-written in nice spagetti-free code that would be easy to maintain and reliable. I was wrong. The code that was there in the 1960's is still there, code today is often like the ultimate junk yard. I thought that eventually everyone would develop code with some degree of planning, coding and testing and maybe "code gardening" where you go weeding and clean up some of the mess. This would produce code that was reliable and easy to maintain blah blah. I thought that governments might be educated to introduce legislation with some understanding of the coding changes required to implement it. We were constantly fighting to get stuff implemented with stupid deadlines. Nobody said "this piece of legislation will take 4 years to implement and cost 1/4 of your annual budget, annually". And they'd pass it with a 3 month deadline or even better "retrospectively" and wonder why nobody ever enforced it. I thought games would get more interesting and easier to play. Wrong. I thought there would be more puzzle based games that didn't require reliable finger twitching to play. There probably are these but I haven't noticed. I thought that the fax-photocopier-printer would be cheaper. I thought that TV's, stereos, and vcr type things would be better integrated. I never thought I'd have a mobile phone, though I frequently wanted one. They still don't work on the lonely highways where you would need one most. I never thought I wouldn't be able to live without email. Actually I'm fine without email out in the desert without email but other things back home fall apart. Ten years from now: I can see a good deal of chaos. How will we filter the information overload, the truth we want to hear from everyone's opinion. I guess Slashdot moderation systems is a start. I'd really like to see real reporting instead of media baron/political brownnosing reporting. I'd like a spam filter that fries the source computer, or at least locates the sender and sends the appropriate info to the cops. I'd like to see companies that insist on inconvenient and expensive activation systems go belly up (broke). I want a home security system with a couple of motion activated cameras that send the photos off site. You can steal my vcr but the pictures are not there. Then the system can alert my neighbour. The one with the rotweillers. I'd like to be able to read stuff on paper or something that didn't involve refresh rates. I'd like a home blood tester that lets me know if I've got something serious that needs treating. I'd still like some privacy but I'm not sure if I will have it. What will cameras everywhere do? Will we all be living "big brother tv game"? I'd like some piece of technology that helps me get a bit of focus instead of distracting me with lots of new ideas and concepts that need to be explored. I'd like to be able to surf the web (what ever that may be) with no wait time. I'd like to have a huge LCD or projection screen with whatever visual art/film/game/novel I like. Hook that up to stereo and have a tropical fish aquarium visual and mood music for dinner parties. I still want my friends to come round. And somehow backup and restore will be redundant or painless.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
Although hardware speeds have increased a 100 fold software has not kept up with it, instead software has become bloated and slow. Windows still takes a minute or longer to load, applications still crash and overall realibilty still has not improved.
Roughly butchering Moore's law:
10 years / 18 months ~= 6.666
2^6.666~=60
So, as a rough rule of thumb, expect things to be about 50-60 times as powerful as they are today:
Given my 2GHz, 1Gb ram, 128mb video ram, 100Gb hard drive system today, a kind of typical PC, I should be running, by then:
120 GHz, 60 Gb ram, 7.5Gb video ram and a 6 terrabyte hard drive.
However, the following will also be true:
1) Windows 2013 will still be as slow as hell (probably clogging that fast 120 GHz processor with all of the things it securely prevents me from doing).
2) My wife will have finally killed me for all the money I've spent, especially as I swore that last year's 80Ghz processor would see me through for a couple of years.
3) According to Nick's newly coined law - every eighteen months my PC will give off roughly double the heat energy - I have just single handedly caused the ice caps to melt.
What expectations did you have for today's PC, 10 years ago and how does the reality match up?
Why not step into the ol' time machine, aka Google Groups' Usenet archive? The thread What specifications will the standard year 2001 PC have? is a fascinating read (really -- I recommend reading every post).
I noticed a few common thoughts throught the thread that didn't pan out: Multiprocessor desktops becoming commonplace. The demise of X86. Also on a whole people's estimates on HD space were very conservative. People predicted ridiculous resolutions for video.
Some people were right on the money though: 1GHz processors, 512MB RAM, and permanent connections to the 'net.
This is one of the best finds I've come across on ye olde Usenet.
Ten years ago I had a 486DX/2 running at 66Mhz with 16MB of RAM, 400MB HD, and a 14.4 modem. My 17" IBM running 1280x1024 in 256 colors was the envy of my friends.
...
Rather than being dissapointed by what didn't happen, here is what I'm pleased about that did happen, that I didn't expect.
- T1 download speeds into my house. My cable modem does 1.5Mbits down and 256Kbits up. That never occurred to me.
- Back then my machine could play back video from CD. Now I can do it in real-time off the Internet.
- Back then my computer chirped. Bill Clinton's voice coming from the White House web page in 1996 was scratchy. Now my entire music collection is on it.
- I can make my own CDs. Data, music or both.
- My machine serves as a digital darkroom.
- My machine lets me communicate with other people through email. (More of a social change than a technological change - back then I had email, but nobody to write to!) IM, IRC, etc. are also common now.
- Home networking.
- A powerful version of Unix in my house, free, with a lot of great applications. (Including MYSQL, which I'm toying with now.)
- Wireless capability so I can work where I want to, not where the computer is.
We've come a long way in 10 years
Today I use an Athlon XP 2400...
Bet you didn't think you'd get a space heater out of your computer!
Many of you expect so much, but have no idea how hard it is/was to create...
These billion-transistor CPU's that people use every day go unnoticed. Do you know how much genious was poured into it's creation?
And you go on to ask for voice recognition and perfect speech generation? Why not perfect AI while you're at it?
Be greatful and don't ask for much... until you go out and contribute to the development of this technology you ask for then you have not right to complain when you don't get it.
Did anyone see the DMCA or RIAA legal pack of business coming ten years from now? Just think of what life in the future will be like post-resolution-of-said-issues. Orrin Hatch wants to crack our cases with destructive virus files...what will electronic entertainment of the future be like?
Cold War II: The Race between Digital Rights and Hackers.
First, the bad news... computing in the large...
I generally see less and less interest in formal methods, formal design, disciplined approaches to software construction (by which I am referring to the use and adherence to serious models, not just fodder for coffeehouse discussions). Small, proven O/S kernels, supertight code, and emphasis on requirements analysis as the sorts of things that make for well-built and defined systems are costly, and just don't sell well in a commercial market which demands and receives revenue and, increasingly, waivers from liability for bad software products. Increasing "offshoring" of software development projects won't help keeping the gap between systems-as-intended and systems-as-developed issues from arising.
Organizations will lean on, and people will continue to accept descriptions of software quality where software testing is emphasized, before software development methodology or rigor.
Many more large and complex systems will be developed. Their sizes (and complexity of interactions) will outpace the ability of the implementation of their development models to support final code products that meet the required security needs of the public, or of customers. Security problems will get worse before they get better.
And in the small...
The good news? Consumer appliances.
You will be able to carry on a thumbnail chip (or, probably, through a more convenient mechanism, access to your personal material of interest. Wifi-type-access back through VPNs to your data should be readily available. This isn't too far from available now...within some limits...) all the music, photos, and items of personal interest that you would collect and store. I would like to have some confidence that this won't be ruined by digital rights management implementation and supporting legislation, but time will tell. I suspect workarounds will exist to circumvent most DRM systems that will come along. Oh yea, store any of that on a server owned by someone else, and you may end up giving up copyrights and more...Privacy rights and related issues over information you store on anyone else's system will get worse before it gets better.
Anyway, some thoughts...
Sam Nitzberg
http://www.iamsam.com
I also remember getting a machine about 10 years ago, and I remember that "the future" was all about voice recognition, automation, crazy multimedia at home, etc. It all seemed very exciting to me back then, and for the most part feels kinda "blah" now that we're here.
/. readers fit here). There are more possibilities in software, hardware, networking, and overall usability then there were 10 years ago, but it's pretty much only the power users who really a) understand them, and b) make direct use of them. For the mainstream users, the computing experience is largely unchanged: email, websites, IM, store your digital photos (this last one may be stretching it for the average user).
/. readers. It took my dad about 10 years to figure out that he didn't have to double-click everything with the mouse (including web pages) in order to open it. And what about our grandparents?
So where's "here"? My summary of where we are today consists of a several things. First, I think there's a bigger divergence between the computing experience of a mainstream user vs. the computing experience of a power user (probably most of
While I always enjoy reading about Microsoft's latest fumble, I think they've been *trying* to make computers more specialized so that the user doesn't have to be. All of their Auto Correct features, assistant paper clip thingies, fully retarded (and grossly insecure) scriptability of every goddam product, and various other "features" that end up annoying the hell out of most of us are in fact a solid attempt to make the experience of using a computer more enjoyable for somebody like my mother. In fact, most of our mothers (and fathers) could probably do well to have a helluva lot of assistance using a computer, while most of us probably disable all of that in favor of more direct control. Keep in mind the population spread - there are way more baby boomers using computers than there are
So for the future, while I would *like* to see all kinds of cool things that would appeal to our geekiness, I'm predicting a slow, plodding future of more of the same - increased divergence between the computing experiences of regular and power users, and way more AutoBullshit and assistance features for the average home user.
Innovation is a funny thing. There's only so much of it that can happen at any one time. That's because there are two finite resources required for it to happen: attention and money. In other words, someone needs to care enough about something to spend time thinking about ways to do it better, and then someone needs to care enough about those new ideas to pay to turn them into realities.
The reason there has been practically no innovation on the desktop in the last ten years has been because that span of time -- ten years -- coincides precisely with the span of time the Internet has been in the public consciousness. Ever since Mosaic hit in '93 the vast majority of money and attention that's available in the world has been focused on the Net -- making it better, faster, more reliable and able to support more complex applications. That hasn't left a lot of those resources to support innovations on the desktop -- and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
The first computer I ever connected to the Net, I connected in 1993. It was a 486SX/25 with 8MB of RAM and a whopping 200MB (yes, MB) hard drive. It ran Windows (version 3.1), Office, and some games.
Today I have a Duron 1200 with 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. It runs Windows (2000), Office, and some games... and a whole boatload of applications (Web browser, graphical IMAP mail client, IM programs, P2P, etc.) that I could not even have imagined in 1992. And, generally speaking, I'm happy with that -- those things are more useful to me than all the things we thought were going to be huge back in 1993 (immersive VR, CD-ROM encyclopedias, etc.) would have been.
So, in short, there's been plenty of innovation -- it's just been in a different direction than you (or I) were expecting.
Read my blog.
...is that computers still aren't the same as televisions: You hit the power button and it's just "there". Sure, we've got suspend and standby and XP boots faster, but it's still a few tens of seconds before the desktop is up and running. Even BeOS wasn't up instantly. Until this happens, PCs will not be where *I* expect them to be by now. The PC should be an appliance by now, and it really isn't.
Un-news
IBM PC, 8088, 4.77Hz, 256K+ RAM, $10,000. Language of choice is BASIC. Video is CGA, but only if you can afford the card, MDA otherwise. Removable storage is the 5-1/2" floppy holding 320K. Some people get wise and punch their floppies to make them double sided.
The OS was PC-DOS, and fit on part of a floppy. Small, fast and feature-less.
Game I remember distinctly was "Gato" (came out about 1985 I think), a submarine hunt game. It fit on a floppy, and was awesome fun!
All PC software had to fit on (and run from) a single floppy.
Networking? Not on the PC! Of course, the PC makes an excellent (but expensive) terminal for a UNIX system, from which you can access the ARPAnet.
Packard Smell, i486, 66MHz, 2Mb RAM, $3,000. Language of choice was Turbo C, although some Turbo Pascal diehards (myself) still lingered. Video is VGA and a smattering of SVGA, XVGA cards. Removable storage of choice was the 1.44Mb 3-1/2" floppy. Some people have CDROMS, but not many. Harddrives are the norm, and their typical sizes are about 100 to 500 Megs.
The OS for most people was still DOS, now version 5.0. People are running this cheesy environment called Windows 3.1 on top of it. I rebel and use OS/2. I need 8M RAM to use it, but it had a UI that GNOME and KDE are barely approaching ten years later.
My games of choice were Civilization and SimCity. They came on floppies, but a lot of other games are starting to come out on CDROMS, which pisses me off since I can't afford one. They also tend to use more RAM and Video than I can afford either.
Software in general is bloating. Stuff that takes up 5 to 10 Megs of disk is common. But I'm not bitching much, since they're adding a lot of features, not counting the GUI.
Networking has arrived! 14.4K modems are becoming standard. If you live in the right area, you can get an internet account. Otherwise AOL and Prodigy are somewhat suitable substitutes.
Home Built, P4, 2.8GHz, 1Gig RAM, $1,000. Language of choice is C++, although several dozen other major languages are common. There are no video standards anymore, but the minimum resolution anyone can put up with is 32-bit 1024x768. GPUs are more expensive and have bigger fans than CPUs. Removable media of choice is the CD-R, with USB memory sticks becoming popular. But the 1.44M floppy is still king. It will probably remain standard equipment until the typical BIOS can boot from USB devices (guesstimate of one year).
The common operating environment is still Windows, but fortunately, the current incarnation runs on top of NT instead of DOS. WinXP recommends 512M RAM. UNIX is making strong headway into the desktop market. Even the most basic Linux distro requires a minimum of 16M RAM, with most recommending 64M.
I haven't bought any games in a couple of years. The last one was Civilization III. (My how things change!) The game market has become dull. My prediction from ten years earlier, that game developers would start scaling back and produce games that would run on systems that the public actually owned, proved false. Instead, the public eagerly upgrades their RAM and GPU's every six months. I see that the many new blockbuster games require video cards that haven't been on the market more than six months.
Software in general has long since passed the bloat stage, and has become quivering mounds of fat reminiscent of dead whales washed up on the beach. This isn't limited to the Windows world. I don't see much increased functionality with OpenOffice versus the Lotus SmartSuite of ten years earlier.
Highspeed internet connections are considered a human right in some regions. You hide your head in shame if you're still using a dialup modem or ISDN.
Okay, now time for 2013 predictions:
Sun Home Workstation, 128-bit i986 class, 1
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
(Sorry, I just couldn't resist)
Twenty years ago I was using a Xerox 1108 Dandelion. It had a megapixel display (admittedly monochrome only, but for more money you could get an 1132 Dorado which had 24bit colour), an optical three button mouse, ethernet, a WIMP interface, WYSIWYG word-processing, spreadsheet, bitmap and vector graphics editors all as software components so that you could drop a vector graphic into a word-processing document and vice versa. It had a distributed hypertext system, technically similar to the Web. And it had a software development environment which makes today's IDEs look primitive.
The system box was about 10% bigger all round than a modern mid-tower case. The monitor was very big and heavy, but it was twenty-one inch. Sometimes the machine was infuriatingly slow, but then we were running very compute-intensive software, which would still be slow on today's boxes.
So what progress have we actually made in twenty years?
Boxes of this class are now cheaper - much cheaper. Ordinary people can now have them. The Dandelion, in those days, cost about two years of my salary, whereas I can earn the price of my current machine in a couple of weeks. And that ignores the fact that my Dandelion had only 4 megabytes of RAM and 80Megabytes of disk (but against that, the LISP system, criticised in those days for being wasteful of memory, was actually a lot more efficient of memory than modern systems).
And processers are faster. How much faster in real user terms I don't know. I remember when I switched to an Acorn Archimedes - the first ARM based machine - how much more responsive it felt. The Dandelion was capable of around two DEC MIPs. My present box does over six thousand 'bogomips'. How close a bogomip is to a 'DEC MIP' I don't know, but in terms of user experience this machine is certainly not three thousand times faster than the Dandelion - ten times, maybe.
So what I'm saying is that actually we've made frighteningly little progress in the last twenty years. In software terms, we've acutally gone backwards. The reasons are very simple
So what are the achievements of the last twenty years? Well, the hardware boys have achieved a lot. Kudos to them. On the software side I think the best and most creative thing that's been achieved is the GNU General Public License. It's about the only real software advance I've seen in my working life.
The next twenty years
So what does this imply for the next twenty years? I think we have to face the fact that the hardware boys will continue to leave us behind. We will see smaller, lighter, lower power devices. We may see usable speach input. The 'desktop box', as we know it, may die, leaving only servers and portables.
Processors growing faster is always good but in a sense this is academic. For most purposes a good user experience can be provided on machines a thousand times slower than our present machines, or, to put it differently, bad programming can eat up every ounce of speed the hardware boys can give us for no discernable improvement in user experience. What I hope to see in twenty years is my six thousand bogomips of processor in a package that draws curre
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.