At that time period, I don't think an open hardware standard would have been very desirable. What the author vaguely touches on, but doesn't go much into detail about, was the switch between hardware finesse and brute force. Back then, memory sizes and hardware speeds were constrained to the point where you COULDN'T do what you wanted with just software. The trick was to offload as much as possible to your trickily designed hardware. The Amiga was the ultimate expression of this and remains the pinnacle of hardware finesse I've ever seen. The ST had its own stable of tricks as well. The Mac was much more of a brute force hardware design with a couple custom hardware support systems, but it also was very plodding and slow. You certainly didn't get much of the "wow" factor with it.
Of course those hardware specific tricks came with a big price - you had to write software specifically for that hardware to gain those advantages.
Let's also be clear that the PC platform didn't have a hardware standard during those years either. Lots of different types of graphics cards and sound cards and other peripheral cards came out - each requiring their own custom programming to access all their features. True, they were often backwards compatible (though not always compatible with competitor products out at the same time), but they still had custom modes and hardware tricks that weren't standard.
It wasn't until the early-mid '90s that memory and processor speeds got to the point where brute force was powerful enough to satisfy users for a lot of the tasks they performed regularly. That is when hardware standards started to become viable. It also coincides with the rise of Windows and the standard platform.
Essentially, any sort of strong standard - hardware, software, programming language, etc. - is essentially an abstraction layer. Any layer of abstraction added comes at a price. Hardware in the '80s simply wasn't powerful enough to pay that price.
Something else that blew my mind with Douglas Adams' work and quantum:
In one of the books (Life the Universe, and Everything?) he explains about how the infinite improbability generator works, and he states that an artifical brain (Bambleweeney Vector Plotter?) is connected to a really hot cup of tea.
One of the problems with quantum computers is decoherence - isolating the qubits from the environment. I was reading an article where they were discussing a strategy for this by isolating the qubits in a fluid that had a strong random component to it, but where the many interactions averaged out to zero. A fluid with lots of brownian motion - in other words, a hot cup of tea would do.
Slashdot Mirror
At that time period, I don't think an open hardware standard would have been very desirable. What the author vaguely touches on, but doesn't go much into detail about, was the switch between hardware finesse and brute force. Back then, memory sizes and hardware speeds were constrained to the point where you COULDN'T do what you wanted with just software. The trick was to offload as much as possible to your trickily designed hardware. The Amiga was the ultimate expression of this and remains the pinnacle of hardware finesse I've ever seen. The ST had its own stable of tricks as well. The Mac was much more of a brute force hardware design with a couple custom hardware support systems, but it also was very plodding and slow. You certainly didn't get much of the "wow" factor with it. Of course those hardware specific tricks came with a big price - you had to write software specifically for that hardware to gain those advantages. Let's also be clear that the PC platform didn't have a hardware standard during those years either. Lots of different types of graphics cards and sound cards and other peripheral cards came out - each requiring their own custom programming to access all their features. True, they were often backwards compatible (though not always compatible with competitor products out at the same time), but they still had custom modes and hardware tricks that weren't standard. It wasn't until the early-mid '90s that memory and processor speeds got to the point where brute force was powerful enough to satisfy users for a lot of the tasks they performed regularly. That is when hardware standards started to become viable. It also coincides with the rise of Windows and the standard platform. Essentially, any sort of strong standard - hardware, software, programming language, etc. - is essentially an abstraction layer. Any layer of abstraction added comes at a price. Hardware in the '80s simply wasn't powerful enough to pay that price.
Something else that blew my mind with Douglas Adams' work and quantum:
In one of the books (Life the Universe, and Everything?) he explains about how the infinite improbability generator works, and he states that an artifical brain (Bambleweeney Vector Plotter?) is connected to a really hot cup of tea.
One of the problems with quantum computers is decoherence - isolating the qubits from the environment. I was reading an article where they were discussing a strategy for this by isolating the qubits in a fluid that had a strong random component to it, but where the many interactions averaged out to zero. A fluid with lots of brownian motion - in other words, a hot cup of tea would do.