21 Dec
1998
21 Dec
'98
6:21 p.m.
At 08:46 PM 12/21/98 +0000, Lawrence Walker wrote:
Concerning his questions you have to keep in mind this
was written in 1975.
As he says it may seem quaint or primitive at a later time , but these were
accute and problematic questions then.
Au contraire! I read the original articles with huge interest. The amazing
thing is to go back to those days and remember the questions! I had
forgotten some of them, and true they seem quaint by today's hardware glut
standards but they are also prophetic in a weird sort of way. Consider the
questions:
Will we ever get a 16 million color flat panel display with 8.5 Mpixels for
< 500 ? (This is what is required for an electronic magazine replacement
(8.5 x 11" at 300 dpi full color) (6.75 Mpixels if there is a 1" margin)
Will we ever get continuous speech recognition in a handheld device ?
Without a noise cancelling microphone? Speaker independent?
These, to me at least, have the same flavor of "maybe in the far future"
that I had when I first read Don Lancaster's articles. But the "far future"
in his case was 15 years. At the current rate of technological advance we
could see these questions answered in half that time!
--Chuck