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Intel Seeking Moore's Law Original Publication
ackthpt writes "Gordon Moore's famous prediction, labeled Moore's Law, was originally published in the April 19, 1965 issued of Electronics. Sometime since, he lent out his copy and it has never been returned. Intel would like an original copy of the now defunct magazine and is offering $10,000 for a copy, presumably in good condition. The story is carried on Reuters, and if you happen to have a copy (of your own, not stolen from a museum or library) you may contact Intel via eBay's WantItNow."
Better get them a copy quickly - in a year and a half, the reward goes down to 5,000$, then 2,500$ another year and a half later....
Margaret Thatcher died the other day. It was a sad day, but I like to think that she's looking up at us right now."
That's the last time I use old science magazines to start a fire...
When you pry it from my cold dead hands.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
He didn't keep a copy. I guess he used a typewriter, it was written in 1965 after all.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Count me in, if you make it worth my while: Double the prize every 18 months.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Thanks to his evil brother's law (Murphy), everything that could go wrong has, and there are no copies left in existence...
I wonder if whoever borrowed the copy Moore had knows that they have it? Has he tried calling his friends? ;)
It's interesting that the cartoon, about half way down, shows Handy Home Computers, about the size of the Mac Mini... I wonder how much the cartoonist would pay for same issue of magazine where his/her illustration prediction has finally come true.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...it's unfortunately become a driving marketing factor for the industry...
...people realize they don't really need more than a 1Ghz to surf the web, send pictures, and listen to music...
...Moore's Law was coming to an end based on simple technical limitations...
Huh? These three points don't mesh at all. A driving marketing factor -> people don't need that much power -> but it doesn't matter because it's coming to an end.
If you can't imagine the use for more processing power, then you're not very imaginative.
Processing power is a remarkable thing - you're talking about 1Ghz as being a pedestrian, adequate level of computing, yet you in a prior life (or rather prior year), back in 2001, were undoubtedly saying "Oh who'd need these crazy 1Ghz processors? A 300Mhz is all anyone would ever need...". Even the luddites somehow pull their requirements forward to be just behind the curve, and I've been hearing the same "who needs more than X" mantra quite seriously since the 386 days. Some people never learn from history though.
But the price just doubled.
of your own, not stolen from a museum or library
I believe the local vernacular is "shared."
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
When ordinary memorabilia auctions (baseballs fetching more than $10k) at much more, $10k would be a pretty small sum to pay for this original copy.
If it's a unique copy, this could be worth much more. And the price will rise as the time progresses.
--
All your magazines are belong to us.
Repeat after me:
Moore's Law has nothing to do with clockspeed.
Maybe get that tatooed somewhere.
It's a Digital Reproduction, PDF. Fooey on that!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Is it safe to do business with Intel on Ebay ?
They've got a feedback score of 0. I'm not so sure I'd want to sell to them...
They might be marketing driven, but on the other hand the processing power nowadays really extends computers. Use hardware from '95 and you'll soon realize that you can't listen to mp3s in real time or that you can't encode some video within a week. I guess that we all agree that every modern computer mostly wastes its cycles, but sometimes it's rather handy to have that extra power at your fingertips.
If they need some stupid "law" to follow it's allright to me.
There is just one thing that bugs me since years: That every new gerneration of chips consumes more power in order to fulfill Moore's prophecy. But I guess we can only blame the consumers in this case.
I don't read replies by ACs.
My mom threw out my shoebox filled with old electrical engineering journals last year. And I'm positive I a had a mint-condition copy of the '65 Electronics.
I guess I'm just finding it difficult to imagine what I would ever need, say, 32Ghz for, other than gaming--which would be what my ultra-hip game console would be for. Thing is, computers are still advancing at a rate that console have a problem catching up with, due to the fact that every aspect of the hardware has to be released at once and, of course, that they can't come in pieces developed seperately and be interoperable between wildly different hardware (all for obvious reasons due to the nature of consoles; I'm really just imperfectly repeating the obvious).
So, for truely impressive games media-wise (alas, the more complex they are technically the less time is able to be spent directly on gameplay and etc, but that's another issue) computers have for quite some time been far better, and probably will remain so for quite some time hence. Consoles sometimes nowadays seem nearly comparable, at least in some cases, but then you look at the abysmal resolutions and you realize that they're cheating performance-wise.
Other than that, I enjoy my rather fast computer (far beyond any console currently available) for many things, for example quick encoding, compression, and reformatting of video and audio (usuallly for entirely legitimate purposes, oddly enough!). As media types are advancing, it's nice to have the hardware to keep up. And to be able to digitally record, edit, and redistribute a movie "filmed" (a misnomer now) by myself, at quality certainly below DVD but superior to VHS and anything concievable at a lower level of technology . . . no, I'm glad that computers are advancing at the pace that they are, and I certainly do find the use.
That being said . . . about two years ago, I became unable to really use the computer that my family was using, a state of the art machine but it was constantly under use by my other family members. Being still in high school at the time, I certainly needed a computer. Especially for chatting and browsing late at night, and at those times I wouldn't be able to make my way through my unbelievably creaky house all the way to the downstairs anyways. So I dug out an old computer of mine, a Pentium-S 100-mHz if I recall correctly, with a massive 8MB of ram or something equally woeful.
And you know what? Armed with programs made in the era it was from (which was a bit tricky to find old ones that would interoperate with the state of things nowadays, but it's possible), it performed quite adequately. I even abused it with programs that should have been far beyond it's ken, but it still trotted along fine (until one day I accidentally destroyed the HDD, but that's another story). And so this computer from the mid-ninetys was easily good enough and functional in the modern age.
In other words . . . I disagree with parent. And then, on further reflection, I completely agree. I hold two conflicting opinions.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
I agree with you to a point, but in 2001, I was never saying 300mhz was all anyone would need. Applications like Office were still slow and memory-hungry. Booting up Windows was a minute-long affair.
That has changed. 512MB of RAM and 1Ghz are a very common baseline now. Office runs just fine on it. E-mail clients run just fine. Web browsing has never really been a system-hungry activity. Gamers are a special niche; most computer users have no need now for more than 512MB of RAM and 1Ghz.
Honestly, can you tell me what they'd need more for if all they're going to do is type documents, send pictures, and surf the web? A friend of mine is still running his 800mhz Powerbook at work with 128MB of RAM with no complaints.
Look at it this way. Cars used to be really slow, and you had to hand-crank them. They got faster and faster and more practical with each decade. Now you could build a car that could go 500mph, but nobody needs it except race car drivers. The only thing that's really changed with cars is more efficient fuel consumption and various niceties like stereo systems and computer navigation. And yet, I'm still getting along with my car made in 1993. Before that, a car made in 1984. A friend of mine still drives a 1960s pickup truck. He simply doesn't need more than that.
I think computers have hit that plateau. I also think that's part of the motivation behind rearchitecturing all of Windows Longhorn so that it's all "managed" and requires an extra layer and more hardware resources to run it all, and therefore a new computer purchase much to Intel's delight. In the Apple world, Mac users hang on to their machines longer because they're not living in a Moore's Law-inspired annual PC upgrade cycle that takes your money every year.
Just my $0.02.
Not too mention the trolling anonymous cowards!
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Moore's Law has "nothing" to do with clockspeed?
Moore's law describes component integration on integrated circuits that are economical to manufacture. This results in, among other things, increased processor speed. Generally speaking, Moore's Law has been adopted as an observation on general computing power.
This is like the people who desperately argue that "hacker" originally meant something else, and that we should all use "cracker" instead. You and I know what we're all referring to, so the argument is just a nuisance.
From the auction description:
This auction is for a digital copy of the above magazine article, including the issue cover and credits page. This is a MINT CONDITION copy because it has been fully restored digitally and available in Adobe PDF format. All raster graphics have been restored and saved at 300 dpi for quality reproduction.
In other words, the person is selling a copyright violation. Methinks eBay would love to know about that.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
more like--a penny for moore's thoughts, sir.
if i'm not immortal, what's the point of living?
...te?
"28k Ought to be enough for anybody", Bill Gates.
Some uses........everything you do now but better. If you think webpages are good now, the music you listen to is high quality, and the images that your computer can render are good I beg to differ. Compared to the rate at which it was orginally recorded, the mp3s ect you use are terrible quality. The web will get alot snazzier with better hardware, and we're still awhile away from photorealistic computer-generated images.
As for reaching technological limitations, remember that your brain is nothing but a computer, it's just one with hardware so incredibly far past what we can create it's not funny. We're hitting technological limits but only with the current technologies, that's why we keep inventing new things.
The price of a missing document doubles every two years, until it exceeds the cost of a new car.
... and it's mileage decreases by the square of its tonnage (in metric tons).
Sadly, the price of a new car goes up by n factorial every year
All figures are in Euros, of course, since the price of a Dollar decreases to n/(n+x) where n is the number of years GWB is in office and x is the trade deficit in trillions of Euros.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I wish people would stop calling Moore's Law a law. Laws don't have the word "about" in them ("transistor counts double about every 18 months"). It should be called "Moore's Observation" or "Moore's Conjecture."
In physics, do we say that force is about equal to mass times acceleration?
I think there will always be a big demand for faster processors, but I don't think there is a need for them. I also don't think that the main focus should be on how to make faster things fit in smaller spaces. They seriously need to do something about this heat problem. 70C for a 775 Prescott chip is an O.K. temperature. That's a bad thing. Let's put some money into fixing the problems with the technology.
To me, making things faster without improving any other aspect of them is like making a car that goes 300km/h but has no additional safety features.
I know I said I'd return it back in '66. I just wanted to read that article on wiring. I swear I'll return it soon, but there's this other article that I want to read first...
OpFlash is a remarkable game, and like you said it can utilize a level of PC far beyond what is available today. OpFlash is actually a great example of the compromises of inadequate computing power (even putting aside visual requirements) - instead of having a complex, full island war, they had to resort to small little areas of units, with the rest of the islands basically uninhabited. They did this because of the inability to reasonable model the AI of a large number of units. My dream game would be opflash but with a fully populated, fully operating island world where you really could fight the war the way you wanted.
Another game that demands more power than even exists today is Falcon 4. Release in 1999, it can still bring a modern PC to a crawl.
It'd be funny to see if someone did post an auction for the magazine and AMD and Intel got in a bidding war. Possibly even funnier if IBM came along and took it right out from under both of them.
mp2s would play, though I am kicking my self for not taking out the mp2 audio codecs out of VCD in '93 and making an mp2 player for windows (in '94 when beta win95 was out)
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
No. If you can't imagine the use for more processing power and why there is the drive that perpetuates Moore's Law, perhaps you've forgotten about Gates's Law.
The previous has been a secret message to my comrades.
Has clockspeed doubled in the last 18 months? No, not even close.
Will it continue to ramp up as it has in the past. Probably not.
Has the number of transistors doubled every 18 months? Yes and it will continue to do so for awhile yet. Moore's Law is valid and will be valid even if there is no clockspeed increase, until we stop doubling transistor counts. You make the mistake in directly tying increases in performance to increase in clockspeed, which is a an oversimplification of what goes on in a cpu.
As to what the average person calls something I could care less, Moore's Law has always pertained to transistor counts.
Performance isn't tied down to clockspeed.
Huh? These three points don't mesh at all. A driving marketing factor -> people don't need that much power -> but it doesn't matter because it's coming to an end.
Moore's law has held for roughly 40 years. By the time computers were commonplace among normal people, people had come to expect that they would become cheaper and faster every year. When that became more difficult, the expectations (driving market factor) caused Intel and others to spend an increasing amount of money and effort to maintain the pace, eventually compromising their architecture to achieve percieved performance advantages (p4 high clock rate mess) over actual performance. For the past few years more and more people have noticed that they really have no need for more power for the stuff they want to do.
Meanwhile, Moore's law is coming to an end (again). That, and Apple hasn't been reported as being on the verge of bankruptcy for at least a year, which is in itself unusual.
If you can't imagine the use for more processing power, then you're not very imaginative.
Sure I can, but most people won't be demanding that sort of power for some time. The stuff they have works quite well for a lot of people, TYVM. Thermal design and quiet computers that don't break are likely to be more interesting than the latest whizbang in the near future.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I am very certain that if all I had access to was 1Ghz with 512Mb RAM that I would find some way to make do... And yes I am a gamer, so I'm not gonna go into that side of requirements... but I have a gaming system that I use everyday for routine activities as well, 3Ghz, 2Gb ram, and I can tell you I very much notice the difference.
;) )
As humans we are creative enough to find more ways to use resources than we have resources to use... Thats why the next processor/mem/speed combination is never enough for very long. We find ways to expand until we are constrained by our resources.
my personal computer is so much better than these (2-3ghz?--system info applet is disabled)p4 512 ram that I actually almost always remote desktop into my own machine, and take the network latency hit because my current computer usage style swamps the systems my university provides.
Right now I have 11 explorer windows open, 2 e-mail, 4 messenger windows with one tabbed with 10 internal windows 4 firefox windows with no less than 8 pages open in each, 1 dos prompt, 2 ssh windows / filetransfer windows 5 notepadwindows 3 pdfs 2 visual studio windows
All of this just for my work (well minus some of the messenger windows). Then I also have a few random apps like skype, bittorrent and itunes, copernic desktop search as mentioned on slashdot, daemon tools and mcafee
Now minus the random crap at the end... all the rest is continuously active... + is my friend 1600x1200 is my pal -- sometime soon I'll be getting another monitor...
The point is that though office, e-mail and webbrowsing a single page all works perfectly fine on the baseline system, people will only be satisfied with the baseline for so long... people's usage habits change as the become accustomed to a certain technology... I wouldn't have started using this many programs if I had to still do it on a 400mhz as we moved up in systems I kept modifying my usage patterns such that after the initial newness of a system wears off I find myself at the limit of its capabilities...
I disagree with your thought that computers have hit that plateau. The car analogy is flawed in this case... I think that along with a gradual modification of the populace's general usage habits, more and more applications will be made available that need more resources. --This is happening already. With more resources available, people will think of more brilliant uses for those resources... AI problems and other complex problems will find more and more solutions in the available hardware... but that hardware will have to grow to fully take advantage of it...
(my $0.02 for yours
Gravity Sucks
They're not the cutting edge. Hell, I'm not, but I see a need for speed because of: mp3's, video-on-demand, podcasting, voice-recognition, rippin' dvd's, capturing TV (myth, xptv, or whatever), centralized media and multiple remote players, kids doing homemade animation, gaming, backups, making backups of dvds so the 2-year-old doesn't destroy the original, advanced video processing, sound editing, home photography archives...
Nah, I don't need a gigabit net, firewire, raid or fast computers. This here 1-mhz Altair, wordstar, and 8" floppies will do me just fine. Together with a daisy-wheel, I can do all the writing I want. Really.
Still to come: videophones, real-time avatars, bespoke animation/video, more on-demand video/audio (including education and games), always-on videoconference ability, trivial offsite backups/redundancy, depth-of-field or other non-video data added to video feeds, any-to-any video feeds (think n-megapixel streaming cameraphone), realtime data analysis on problems that currently are out of reach, even broader upheavals between mainstream-media and blogs/indy musicians, etc.
Every time you give me more power, I'll find problems worth solving and places to use it. I used to slip a digit in some finite element work and take puzzles from 40-hrs of cpu time to unsolvable. Given a few more years, my old work will be running at 30 frames a second.
Right now, a pic of the Power5 chip is pinned to my wall: 8 cpu cores, 4 mmus, 144mb cache, one chip/die. Ads say this baby scales up to 16-ways for 128 cpus possible, at 2ghz. I say it's just a good start...
Some interesting facts I gleened from an article written by Tom R. Halfhill, an analyst for Microprocessor Report.
Fact #1: More's Law is not a scientific law, but and only an observation describing semiconductors pace of progress.
Fact #2: Intel cofounder Dr.Gordon E. Moore did not define Moore's law as it is understood today. He didn't even call it a "law" in the original article. Somebody else much later coined the now famous term.
Fact #3: Moore's law was never about processor clock frequency or other performance issues. Rather, it regards the economic manufacturing of component integration on integrated circuits.
Fact #4: Moore's law actually stated component integration doubles every 12 months - not 18 - and he actually ammended this prediction to 24 months. 18 months is a number seemingly drawn from a hat.
Fact #5: Moore's law is extremely inaccurate. Tom Halfhill estimates todays chips would have more than 27 trillion transistors, when in reality Intel's Prescott Pentium sports 169 million transistors.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
i'd think it'd go in the opposite direction in accordance to Moore's law. the longer you keep it, the more worth it has (as with most of these antique type of things).
so now it's $10,000. next year it'll be $20,000, then $40,000 and so on.
HD Trailers
What happened to the brilliant software designers of that era?
They're busy reading slashdot?
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I type this every time.
Let's say that I did have a copy of this magazine. I would expect to be paid for it based on Moore's Law. Its only fitting. So with that in mind, let's see how much it woiuld be:
Magazine came out 40 years ago. Moore's Law says it doubles every 18 months. That's 26.6 doublings. Let's take 26 to make it easy. So thats 2^26 of the price.
I could not find what the cover price was but let's be fair and say $0.10 (10 cents). So thats 2^26 * 10 / 100 = $6,710,886.40. Thats a good deal more than the $10,000.00 they are offering.
I think its a rip-off.
BTW: here is a link to the original article in PDF format.
Bet this
Look at it this way. Cars used to be really slow, and you had to hand-crank them. They got faster and faster and more practical with each decade. Now you could build a car that could go 500mph, but nobody needs it except race car drivers. The only thing that's really changed with cars is more efficient fuel consumption and various niceties like stereo systems and computer navigation. And yet, I'm still getting along with my car made in 1993. Before that, a car made in 1984. A friend of mine still drives a 1960s pickup truck. He simply doesn't need more than that.
I think computers have hit that plateau.
Your analogy is flawed. Computer speeds have to keep up with the increasing requirements of software. As software gets larger and does more, processors need to become faster in order to present the same speed of interface to the user. Cars, on the other hand, don't have changing requirements. The roads they run on today are the same roads as fifty years ago. The only reason we'd *need* faster and more powerful cars would be if the roads kept getting steeper and steeper. Since that's not the case, cars don't change much and you can get by with an older car because it runs on the same road as a modern one.
So if you're happy running the software you did a decade ago then you don't need a faster computer. But if you want your software to do more and more, you're going to need a faster processor unless you enjoy waiting around longer and longer.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
nuf sed
This is in the disclaimers section
Intel employees & their families ineligible.
Why? Why won't they buy from Intel employees?
Or is that all Intel employees have to pledge their first borns & magazine collections when they join the company?
...my girlfriend wants me to throw out my old computer magazines. I got to show her this. :-)
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
1) subscribe to all magazines
2) Rent a warehouse to keep them
3) ???
4) Profit!!!!
There was a man by the name of Mike Myers(sp) in San Jose who worked out a deal with comic book companies to buy their surplus stock from warehouses, have them shipped to him via train, which he then in turn bagged, stuck a 99cent for 3 label on them, and sold them to discount chains such as Walmart. This upset collectors greatly as mint condition previously uncirculated issues of rare comics started to flood the market, all available to those willing to sort through the bargain bins. Eventually he started putting stickers on them denoting them as being surplus rather than collectible, but still maintained a store front which I presume contained some gems found by the employees as they were bagging 3 for 99cent comics. He was making enough money off the 3 for 99cent deal he wasn't worried anything rare or valueable.
Needless to say your business model is actually a somewhat valid one, but chances are there already is a warehouse filled with crap that you could buy cheaply if you are willing to take the time, or if you prefer sell at walmart for 99cents a bag.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Yeah, but that doesn't take into account the brick wall that is "IP" law, which is just now starting to prevent most of the previous works from being built upon.
In the 1960s, most large computers were used on a timeshare basis. In many instances, if you wanted calculations done, you bought blocks of "computer time" by the minute. Thus, twice the computing power would = half the cost. Therefore something that cost $10000 one year should only cost $5000 the next year (when the computer was twice as fast), etc.
The funny thing is that I'd be midly angry if it were any other post you copied, but Singularity awareness must increase by any means...
Power to the Peaceful
I have to disagree a bit. Back when the PII 300 was king, there was still a lot of 'waiting' going on. I'm sure a lot of it may have had to do with memory limits back then (remember, Win95 can't address more than 64MB efficiently), but overall everything was still somewhat slow. We all felt that things could go faster.
;-)
Also, keep in mind that when the high end was 300MHZ, the low end was still in the 486 range. That was one hell of a defecit between the low and the high. Low end machines could barely run the latest office apps.
Fast forward to now. The low end box out there is roughly a 1GHZ machine with 128-256MB RAM. Let's say 256MB is the low end for argument's sake. The high end box (in a corporate or home environment; we're not talking video rendering here) is in the 3GHZ range with 1GB RAM.
Now, take your average home user or administrative assistant, and have them speed test each machine for a day. Then ask them which was faster overall. I'd bet that many of them can't tell the difference. Even those that could would most likely tell you that the difference was negligible, once all the apps load into RAM.
My point is, the low-to-high end performance gap now compared to 2001 is exponentially smaller. We really are reaching the point where a two or three year old computer is more than enough for the majority of computer users out there.
I think if you could quantify the 'usefulness' of the personal computer, contrast it with the machine's power on paper, and put it on a reverse timeline, you'd see something on par with Moore's Law, only in reverse, and much more accelerated.
Hell, I think I'll chart it all and release a paper on the subject. I'll call it Jerky's Law, and will someday offer a reward for the original slashdot posting
Moore stated that computing power would double every 18 months... his estimations were a tad slow -- introducing the new P6!!! released just 5 months after the P5 and over twice as fast *at over 4 times the cost*
Buy it now at Dell.com!
Mens et Manus
Guess it's high time I paid my first visit to the school's library...
I recall seeing amazing programs running in 16k of RAM on a 2Mhz Z80. What happened to the brilliant software designers of that era? They're sure not working on today's platforms.
Software is designed to do a lot more these days. Team sizes have gone up significantly. Unfortunately, when you have 10 or 100 (or 1000) people working on a piece of software, it can't be made as "tight" as one person trying to squeeze it all onto a machine with 16k of ram. The interface artist wants to include transition animations to give the users a spatial mapping thereby increasing the ease of picking up an application. The Logic coders want the applications to serve the user only with the data that is relevant to them. The backend coders want the application to run on four platforms, supporting any number of hardware and software interfaces. And management wants all of this to be done cheaply and quickly. Alone, any of these things could be optimized well, but integrated into a massive platform which outsizes one person it gets difficult to find and fix all of the bottlenecks. Add to that the additional layers of abstraction that have made coding much, much easier than it once was, and you have a different beast.
Plus, those 16k of ram applications had terrible interfaces. I remember my father worked on a text editor which shipped with a manual the size of a brick. It had no help functions, no obvious mapping between keys and input, if you gave it input it didn't understand it just didn't do anything... It was like VI, but less user friendly.
If software ingenuity progressed anywhere near the rate of hardware, we would have infallible voice and character recognition, true A.I. and the concept of computer crashes and security problems would be a thing of the past.
We have great voice and character recognition (Dragon rocks), but without a lifetime of experiences powering it they fall short of what people expect. "True" A.I. is impossible until we understand how Natural Intelligence functions, a hurdle neuroscientists have yet to overcome. Crashes and bugs are a factor of any engineering project, be it computer programming or building bridges. And as computer power has increased, so has the power afforded to hackers. But it is a lot harder to get a good virus going these days.
But what do we have? Abstraction layers that let you program a 3D game or a 2D word processor in an afternoon. Inline spelling and grammar correction. Graphical processing suites that can instantly change a photograph into a convincing watercolor. 3D CAD applications that can create functional hardware for extreme circumstances, and rapid prototyping machines to build parts. Atonomous agents which look for RSS feeds of desirable files, and distributed download clients which gather them. Unlimited levels of Undo. 100% fault-tolerant remote communication between any two machines in the world. Machines running virtually inside of other machines. Bayesian spam filtering. Heck, if we're talking 1982 computing, add the concepts of protected memory space, (gasp!) multitasking, and multithreading to that list. And audio / video compression and streaming, or for that matter graphics and pretty much everything that has become standard for the internet. Searches we perform routinely today would have been considered intense data mining operations 20 years ago.
While it may not have been the direction our forefathers believed (promised?) computing would go, it has still been a very interesting past 20 years.
The ______ Agenda
I recall seeing amazing programs running in 16k of RAM on a 2Mhz Z80. What happened to the brilliant software designers of that era? They're sure not working on today's platforms. ...embedded platforms, and the system/toolkit libraries we all love and use. Some of that stuff is still assembly optimized. As for RAM, in games graphics, music and game state take far more than any "code" does. In business apps, the data sets do. Nobody cares if you're using 16kB or 1600KB if you're working on 10000kB of data.
As for CPU speed, most people have far more than they need. But compare the cost of a CPU to developer time - it simply doesn't work out. It is much much cheaper to allow developers to use large abstractions and system libraries (which eventually get very clean and bugfree), than it is to use slower CPUs. Again, except in embedded markets, and even that's changing.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings