29 Oct
2006
29 Oct
'06
9:56 a.m.
On 29 Oct 2006 at 5:46, Jules Richardson wrote:
The question of who has the smallest computer might be
an interesting one.
Whilst in later years the technology allowed machines to pack a lot more
electronics into the case, the physical size didn't really decrease much - and
in a lot of cases got bigger (quite often due to built-ins like disk drives
that didn't *need* to be part of the main system).
I think you need look no further than your moble phone or perhaps
your wristwatch.... :)
The mobile probably has far more computing power--and quite possibly
(depending on mode) more storage and a higher-resultion display.
A friend brought over his newly-purchased PC to get his old stuff
from his Socket-7 Pentium system migrated. It was an
eye opener as
to what was going in bottom-of-the line desktop machines. SATA
drives (no parallel ATA available), no serial or parallel ports, no
expansion slots other than for the video and a modem card. There was
a floppy connector on the mobo, but I have no idea if it supported 1
or 2 floppies.
Since his old machine didn't have a network card (and I didn't want
to go through the trouble of installing one), I just burned all of
this important data on a CD-R and handed it to him.
If the manufacturers ever get the display thing licked (e.g. by
direct project onto the user's retina) and the keyboard thing done
(no, I don't consider texting on a mobile the optimum keyboard entry
method), I suspect that we'll all be using mobiles for routine
computing tasks shortly.
That will make the current desktop PCs seem almost as unwieldly as
the computing behemoths of the 50's.
Cheers,
Chuck