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The Most Incorrect Assumptions In Computing?
Miss Muis writes "After reading once again that Moore's Law will become obsolete, I amused myself thinking back to all the predictions, absolutes and impossibles in computing that have been surpassed with ease. In the late 80s I remember it being a well regarded popular 'fact' that 100MHz was the absolute limit for the speed of a CPU. Not too many years later I remember much discussion about hard drives for personal computers being physically unable to go much higher than 1GB. Let's not forget "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" from the chairman of IBM in 1943, and of course 'Apple is dying...' (for the past 25 years). What are your favorite beliefs-turned-on-their-heads in the history of computing?"
the worst assumption many of us are making is that humans are not themselves computers.
About Kurzweil
If you lost your job today, don't despair. You may die tomorrow anyway.
"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time. As the successor to DOS, which has over 10,000,000 systems in use, it creates incredible opportunities for everyone involved with PCs."
-- Bill Gates, from "OS/2 Programmer's Guide" (forward by Bill Gates)
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
I remember working at a research firm for an internship, and the head of our department said over lunch one day that he actually spent more time dealing with problems he was having with his computer than actually doing any useful work. I've noticed this with myself also, and even though I enjoy figuring out what's going on with my computer, I imagine many people don't. Email and websurfing always suck away my working hours, what with a PC right here on my desk, and not to mention that I get asked to help other people out with their machines every once in a while, it wastes both our time.
Makes me think though...wasn't it always implied that computers would save peoples time? Has that assumption yet proved that it is indeed true? I'm not so sure it has, although maybe that's because we aren't using the things the right way. Perhaps we are waiting for a computer savvy workforce and then this might be true...but then again, who knows...
I remember telling my father once after he had bought a 40Mb hard drive that this should last him forever. Nothing could ever fill up more than this. Of course this was well before the days of .mp3 and .mpg.
When I was a kid, I remember watching the Jetsons and when George came home from work he coomplained that he had just finished a hard day at work pushing buttons. I remarked to my father that Noone could ever get a job where all they did was push buttons all day. Now, except for the one knob on the 'scope under my desk, all my interfaces to the outside world ARE buttons.
I guess I'm full of underestimations...
... we won't need floppy disks anymore.
It's been ten year that I hear this statement continuously. Last time I broke the MBR on a server without a CD drive, I had no other choice than to boot on a floppy.
Iraq: war to save the U
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
The mainframe is dead
"I don't understand why people would need more than 4gb..." (Bill Gates in an interview on 64 bit ccomputing, in which he said he didn't understand peoples' interest in it)
XML will replace relational databases
OOP will lead to more robust, easier to maintain and higher quality software
By making COBOL resemble English, anyone can program.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I find the sales arguments for the first hobby computers the worst miss at all. Or is it just me who isn't using the computer to keep track of all my recipes?
The second worst would be that we would be in a paperless society. Uhm, yeah, unfortunately some shmock invented wysimolwyg PRINTERs too.
Other than that, I see new predictions fail all the time, and even being reinvented. Who else remembers the "Gorilla Arm Syndrome" of the 80's with touch screens? They were predicted to take over, but that didn't happen. And it ain't happening now either, with the flatbed computers -- touch screens just aren't ergonomic enough for any prolonged use, as most people can't keep their hands in the air for any length of time.
Same with gyroscopic mice -- they're going the way of the Dodo, despite happy predictions.
Regards,
--
*Art
Luckily Microsoft proved that assumption was false.
who in 1950 said that in 50 years we will be able to programme computers "to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning" 53 years later we are still so incredible far from this. see this for more details.
Since at the time, they had finished doing just that with consumer electronics industry and were well on the way to doing just that to the automotive industry, most CS types were justifably concerned.
Well, the rest of the story is that it didn't happen. Not even a whimper of it got over to the western world.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olsen, Founder, Digital Equipment Corporation
I don't think Watson's quote really fits into these sorts of discussions because the entire nature of what a 'computer' is was entirely different when he said it.
Olsen's quote, however, is simple lack of vision since he was addressing fairly modern era PCs directly.
I just know that was driving you all nuts.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
"Belief means not wanting to know what is true." [Nietzche, The Anti-Christ, 1889]
Ok, Gates claims he never said it. Great. I'd leave it at that, but I went to a talk he gave at the University of Waterloo in 1989, and he did meekly accept responsibility for that quote. We all politely chuckled, and the talk went on.
I could easily be mistaken, as that was quite a while ago, but I distinctly remember it as a mea culpa.
If you say, "now I'll be modded down because of X", I'll happily oblige.
IBM continues to be one of the leading (if not the leader) computer companies, and as a business has been around for more then a century, and has always been profitable. They clearly have recovered from a momentary laps in judgement, which, in historical context can be forgiven.
DEC, on the other hand.. Well, Olsen was a dumbass, plain and simple. He also is quoted as saying "Unix is snakeoil". What is amazing is not that DEC got swallowed up by Compaq, a companies whose core business is putting computers in peoples homes, but that they managed to survive as long as they did with morons like Olsen at the heml.
MS-DOS does not have a 640K memory limit.
I've used a computer that had 900K of memory and ran MS-DOS just fine. All of it was conventional memory. No tricks.
The 640K limit comes from the following architectural limitations:
(1) Intel 8086 physical addresses are 20 bits long.
(2) IBM partitioned the 1 megabyte address space into 640K of memory space, 384K of device space.
Other manufacturers made MS-DOS computers that were not PC register compatible. Some of them did allocate more of the 1024K address space to memory. MS-DOS works just fine up to the physical addressing limit of the 8086.
Back around 1981, I read a Byte article about the new IBM PC which said that it had a gigantic memory space. And they were right! Filling up that 640K would cost about $5000 at the price of memory back then. I think it's reaasonable for a personal computer to have enough address space to handle $5000 worth of memory (especially when $5000 in 1981 dollars is worth quite a bit more than $5000 in 2003 dollars).
Are you using a 64-bit desktop yet? Because if you're not, your 2003 desktop computer can't handle $5000 of memory!
"Computers will lead to a leisure society where people have much more free time for personal pursuits and family"
- my grade 10 high school teacher19 years ago
"...but 5 years from now
everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5."
Andy Tanenbaum, Creator of Minix
30 Jan 92 13:44:34 GMT
Andy wrote this during the "Linux is Obsolete" debate between Linus Torvalds and himself back in '92.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Keep in mind that when TJ Watson said it, his company was *already* engaged in the sale of semi-programmable card-sorting and tabulating gear, of which they were building a LOT.
What he *meant* was "There's a market for 5 really high-end machines far and above the rest of the competition". The word "supercomputer" wouldn't be around for a few decades yet. And what do you know? Even today, there's a small handful of machines at the truly high end (currently, above 5 teraflops or so)
I remember reading that it now takes NASA substantially more man-hours to do the same tasks now than before computers were used for design/CAD work. If I remember correctly, it took engineers roughly half the amount of time to design a rocket like the Saturn V than it would today using CAD (Computer Aided Design)! Also, much more paper is used now then back then when all of the drafting was hand-drawn, with typewriters used for everything else. I think they also tended to make fewer mistakes because they were more closely involved in the numbers, not using a potentially buggy black box to help them out.
Approximately true, but you can't make a transistor less than N atoms thick, where N is "thin enough to allow a significant probability of electrons tunneling". Depending on whether you want to allow a 5% error rate or 1%, or less, N is at a guess about 4 to as much as 16 nanometers (nm). The exact cut off is hard to fix, because it depends on just how much of the design you want to devote to error correction, but it's definitely there. Finding a way around it will take making small groups of atoms behave deterministically instead of according to Quantum Mechanics. That is unfortunately a hard problem. No one has a real clue as to how to solve it.
What isn't yet clear is just what error correction itself means. Could a designer get a bit smaller scaling, but only by making the chip unable to run any existing programs? Could we turn quantum effects to our advantage with what is called Quantum based computing? Will Intel or IBM want to make a computer that needs a completely different approach to writing every last bit of software it can run?
The answers to the first two questions are unknown. The third, however, is an obvious NO! Mor's law will stop, either because we can't make the switches any smaller, or because we stop using transistors.
Who is John Cabal?
You got a good ways. Now you just have to think.
The question was 'What have you accomplished in congress?' or something similar. So now let's look at his response in that *CONTEXT*.
Did Al Gore take the initiative IN CONGRESS in creating the internet? You bet he did! In fact, Newt Gingrich said that if there had been no Al Gore, there would be no internet as we know it today. (Of course, that was a few years ago. But still.) He was the prime mover behind getting funding for it. And without government funding, the internet would never have grown like it did, and may well still be some strange, escoteric thing that connects a few universities together... and AOL (or *shudder* MSN) could be the 'Information Superhighway'.
So, you can still say that since he didn't explicitly SAY 'in Congress' in response to the question about what he did in congress, he was actually claiming to have invented the entire internet from scratch. But at that point, anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty would have to admit that this was a 'lie' that was created entirely by the press and was perpetrated on an American public that is instantly ready to believe anything they hear, as long as it's bad.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.