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 primitive of todays (2006) computers can store the total amount of information contained in a good sized library? While, computers did not deliver the goods that we expect them to do, but at the same time they have opened up a whole set of new possibilities that have the potential to make the world better-connected, more-equal and efficient. (Here, I used the word potential!)

Since around 1996 I was using my own 'personal' computer. (That means I had a machine that was used only by me, though it was strictly not mine.) From that day onwards, I started collecting useful and not-so-useful information in the computer. In the beginning they were mostly computer programs -- things that were supposed to be associated with even '50s computers. However, soon afterwards I started collecting e-mail messages -- after all, they come to your computer, so, why not archive them there? (In fact, this was sometimes quite useful for digging up past events to check what happened and when.) Little by little my scope for collecting became wider and wider. By around 2001, I was pretty much keeping almost all of my research related notes, publications, presenations slides and many other things, permanantly in my computer.