26 Oct
2011
26 Oct
'11
6:29 a.m.
On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 10:42 AM, SPC <spedraja at ono.com> wrote:
In this way, I couldn't avoid during last days,
seeing with certain
perspective the passing away of S.Jobs, DMR and now McCarthy, to think
about
what was the computing and what is, mostly as Science but as a Profession
too. It's my profession (yet) but many times, as these days, I feel the
passion for it flying away every year. Is the cause of this my belief in
the
end of an era ?
I think it's the commoditization of computing that's making professional
computing careers feel less 'special' I was fascinated by computers as a kid
as they seemed like some ultra-rare, mysterious, huge machine out of a
sci-fi movie. They were the future - knowledge and their use were limited to
those who could wrap their head around exotic numbering systems and
mathematical concepts. Computers themselves were alien devices - liquid
cooled, maintained with exotic thermal imaging devices and connected to
special networks that only huge companies and the DoD had access to.
Right now I have, in a briefcase-sized box under my desk, a thousand times
the computing power of a Cray 2 and 26 times as much memory. My graphics
cards alone have eight times the amount of memory of a fully loaded Cray 2.
You can walk into a store in a shopping mall and buy this much computing
horsepower.