Computing Evolution

[Brian Fahrlander]

    I was having breakfast this morning, remembering some of the work 
I'd done. I remembered the day Kevin Carter of Turner Beverages 
(Huntsville, AL) charged me with buying a new 20M hard drive- an 
ST-225.  I drove like it was nitro; it cost $600!  A year or two later I 
learned that it takes a great deal more than that to hurt an ST-225.

    But it crossed my mind that neither Windows nor Ubuntu would even 
distribute on this drive anymore, much less run. The 64K static RAM 
boards that started my career off are less than a stack pointer on 
modern systems these days. I've been told the 'sweet spot' on Vista is 
at about 4G of RAM, and of course many, many gigs of drive space.

    Here's the key: We keep moving up in capabilities (larger memory, 
faster parts, etc) but we don't solve more complex problems....we just 
handle the same kinds of problems with greater ease and style.

    It's been about 30 years now, still no flying cars :) and we still 
don't have computers that speak and hear us, we can't ask a computer 
"Where's the best place to start a business?" and get information that 
we can make use of without further study.

    Artificial Intelligence seems to have died on the pad; speech 
recognition too. For the last 20 years or so, it's all been around the 
desktop metaphor.  How long until we start on something more? Where does 
Linux fit into this evolution?

-- 
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 Brian Fahrländer                 Christian, Conservative, and Technomad
 Evansville, IN                               http://CounterMoon.org/bio
 ICQ: 5119262                         AOL/Yahoo/GoogleTalk: WheelDweller
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