Jill Rowling wrote:
>
> > ObLinux: Would Linux cope with an AI the scale of Mike Holmes?
>
> Would not scale. Can imagine self asking permission to format new disk...
> Can imagine answer.
> I wondered at the time that Heinlein had been looking at PDP-11 front
> panels.
> That's the only thing that struck me as odd in his description when I
> re-read the book a couple of
> years ago.
It interesting when reading old material how much they expected future computers
to be able to do - the sci-fi authors had created artificial intelligence and
computers that could run the world - but no-one in the computer industry
actually though that this would require quite a few magnitudes more capability
than what was available. Because of this we have various limits imposed a long
time ago that still affect us today - things like the 640K base memory for DOS,
or the inability to boot from partition above 8GB on some systems.
How long is it likely to be before 64 bit architecture becomes a limitation?
Already 32 bits are too small for use in a lot of places - 32 bits places a
limit of 4G possabilities on anything it is applied to. 4GB or RAM may sound
like a lot today, but 10 years ago the 196MB in my home system would have been a
lot, and 8GB or storage thought to be far more than one person could ever use.
I wonder if 10 years from now peopel will look back on teh computers in
contempery sci-fi and wonder how we ever could have been so limited in scope.
If they will look on the GUI as an anacronism, the way many people already do
about the command line interface. (I personally don't - I like having a CLI, and
I'd hate to do any serious programming work with a dictation program.
hash-include-space-left-angle-bracket-ess-tee-dee-eye-oh-dot-ach-right-angle-bracket-newline-newline...
)
So what can be done to future proof things? The Y2K issue showed how not
planning ahead can cause big headaches for future users - what are likely to be
the first limits linux comes up against? I know the linux time-keeping system
falls over after 2038, but what else could limit it? How much RAM can it
handle? How much hard-drive space can it look after? How hard would it be to
change the default length of an int from 32 bits to 64, 128 or more?
>Then again, when the books were written, it was necessary to have
> flashing lights on front panels. How else could you read the register
> values?
Much more useful the the MHz indicators on a lot of systems a few years back.
I wouldn't mind having a few register contents listed on the front of my system
- at least then I could tell when it's locked up and when it is just busy.
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