A Productive Desktop Environment for Scientists and Engineers - Part IV
Lost Worlds on Desktop
When we were kids, there was a time we referred to the computers as electronic brains; and though we had not seen a one for real, we revered the concept. After all we were brought up in the world of HAL 9000 and R2-D2 and believed that in just a few years passing the Turing test will be peanuts for the real-world computers. Well... the reality? Twenty odd years has passed and computers are nowhere near the level of doing intelligent things. Strong AI claims of the eighties and nineties were basically flops (though in science we can never claim that something will not be invented in the future).
A very rough estimate of the number of characters stored in a 200,000-book library can be made as follows:
- An average pages will have about 400 words. [1]
- A good approximation of an average word size is six.
- An average number of pages of a book will be around 300. [2]
- In ASCII encording, one byte can hold one character.
- 200000x300x400/1000000000=24 Giga Bytes.
- Most of the computers that came in to market during last five years had more than 24GB of hard disk space.
- Potentially our computers can store information contained in an average library quite easily!
Had everything was disappointing and boring about computers? Well...they certainly did not live up to our expectations, but at the same time they helped us achieve an entirely different set of tools and skills that we never expected from them. Who thought the computer will be the centerpiece of a communication revolution which allows us to write a letter, post it to a destination halfway around the globe and get the reply withing a few minitues. Or did we imagine that computers in Japan will show on their screen what is stored in a library of the United States? Do we appreciate the fact that the most basic
Since around 1996 I was using my own 'personal' computer.
