Day: Welcome back.
I agree with your quote and most of your comments on this one. The hardware processing power is now mis-directed into a focus on the CPU and not increasing the bus(s) architecture and video display. VIA with their C3 low-power product line will soon have the DDR-333 (166MHz front side bus with double pulsing) chip-set on the FlexATX motherboard form factor. That means a battery powered computer system could be as fast as the low-cost desktops from Intel & AMD which are now in the 1GHz to 1.3GHz CPU speed/ratings. I remember at 1988 Comdex I saw a specialty built prototype which had dual 80286 CPU's - one for the video and one for processing programs and data. This thing had DesqView for task switching and was a fore-runner of the their task switching between DOS & UNIX. It all got REAL quiet about a week after the show and then I heard Intel had bought the small R&D company which was a spin-off of a university computer department folks. One of the things I like about Steven and his BasicLinux is his ability to work on 8MB of RAM. Now if had a few of those first-generation Dauphin 486 small display computers that were a small laptop - big palmtop from factor from about 1990 to 1992 era. That would work real well to take on the road and not worry about someone walking off with your multi-thousand dollar laptop. John Oram Day Brown wrote: > > Bill Howard, PC MAG p71, 3/12/02: > "yes, the microprocessor inside a 2ghz PC works 10,000 times > as fast as the one in my first PC. But it's still as much a > struggle to create three-up mail-merge labels in Microsoft > Word as it was with WordStar 3 in 1982. [And need I point > out that this was done in DOS?] > ... > We forget how much WisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 liberated us from > Adding machines... and Greenbar mainframe reports." Of course, > if you are under 50, you prolly dont remember working in offices > with typewriters and adding machines and messy corrections. > > This is yet another clue I see in the growing awareness that > the PC evolution has reached the era of dinimishing returns. > > But the fact is, that a SURVPC is good enough to read this. The > problem is not the hardware so much as the appropriate software, > which has put more creativity into the design of intuitive ways > of doing things rather than glitzy eyecandy. > > Getting that message across in the face of the media blitz used > to sell new PCs has not been easy. > > To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with > unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. > Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. > More info can be found at; > http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
