Re: Windows Genuine Advantage -- Indeed?

On Sun, 9 Jul 2006 01:15:09 +0000 (UTC), Randolph Fritz
<randolph@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In 1970 the shooter, the videoconferencing, the music player all
existed. You might have to wait for 1980 for the WYSIWYG word
processor, and the public networking infrastructure for electronic
checking and web browsing did not exist until the '90s. He's pretty
much right; the machines are much smaller and the networks are bigger
(thank you, Al Gore!), but our software really doesn't do much more,
and it takes more memory and CPU to do it.

What 3D shooter existed in 1970? The state of the art of computer
games in 1980 was Defender, which ran on a dedicated machine.

And note that I descibed a single machine that is running *all* of
those applications, sometimes simultaneously. I don't doubt that there
were machines that had the hardware to run many of the things I
specified, somewhere in the world--though I'm still doubtful about
44Kbs sound or digital video processing in near-realtime.

To add something else to the list: I know for a fact that in 1970
there was nothing like Folding@Home, because in 1983 I was paid to
help explore one of the first robust programs which tried to describe
the behavior of organic molecules from mathematical models. It was
painfully slow and awkward; proteins were far out of the question.
Folding@Home would have seemed like a miracle from another planet.

Finally, there are differences of degree which become differences of
kind. When I started using e-mail, delivery routinely took two to
three days and I had to specify the entire routing path to my
recipient by hand, making it barely preferrable to paper mail. Being
able to specify a modern @ address (user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) and have the
e-mail arrive within milliseconds makes e-mail something completely
different from paper mail.

--
Kevin J. Maroney | kjm@xxxxxxxxx | www.maroney.org
Games are my entire waking life.
.

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