Tue, May 15, 2007, 2:18am
Back to the Future
Computers
W
atching videos of the state of the art of computer science from the 1960s is a very humbling experience. It seems that everything that has happened since has been just fleshing out the visions people had sketched out back then. Part of the problem is that the hardware has become so uniform. Software stays within the same general bounds given the same input/output. OS innovation has largely stagnated. Even programming languages haven't changed a whole lot. Surely we can start taking larger steps into unknown territory again, no?
To be fair, thinking about computers per se is probably the wrong way to look at this. There is real hardware experimentation, in the form of phones, palm-tops, blackberries, etc. And the web has become the new frontier for finding ways to distribute social items and info. Still… there still seems like there's plenty of room to move from here. We are, after all, just at the beginning of the computational era (assuming humans keep on keepin' on).
To be fair, thinking about computers per se is probably the wrong way to look at this. There is real hardware experimentation, in the form of phones, palm-tops, blackberries, etc. And the web has become the new frontier for finding ways to distribute social items and info. Still… there still seems like there's plenty of room to move from here. We are, after all, just at the beginning of the computational era (assuming humans keep on keepin' on).