15 Jan
2004
15 Jan
'04
8:47 p.m.
And any decent electronics hacker can interface
electron-tube logic to
modern-day logic with fairly minimal effort. I expect the analogous
statement to be true 50 years from now.
Don't be so sure about "minimal effort". What if electricity is no longer
used in computers, and the photon based computer is all that matters? What
if binary becomes a thing of the past, replaced by bitstreams of
probabilities? Or neural net technology finally explodes? 50 years is a
long way away...and a great deal can happen.
Yes, I think you still will be able to replace yesterday's and todays
chips 50 years from now. Maybe it will be as easy as just letting some
tools read an old databook, and out of the oven comes a nice hot chip
ready to go. Maybe it will be a royal pain in the backside, as well. We
can not say.
What I can be certain of is that 50 years down the road, people will be
finding caches of the old parts, just as today we find caches of 50 year
old parts. Just like today, with a little legwork, almost anything will
be able to be found.
William Donzelli
aw288(a)osfn.org