human-nets@ucbvax.ARPA (12/16/84)
From: Charles McGrew (The Moderator) <Human-Nets-Request@Rutgers>
HUMAN-NETS Digest Sunday, 16 Dec 1984 Volume 7 : Issue 82
Today's Topics:
Query - A Rural Net of Micros,
Computers and People - Compact Disks versus Books (2 msgs) &
Protein Computers?,
Information - Talk by Steven Levy on Hackers,
Computers and the Law - Side Effects of Unions
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Date: Thu, 13 Dec 84 11:34:28 EST
From: Bruce Nevin <bnevin@BBNCCH.ARPA>
Subject: query re rural net of micros
To: bn@BBNCCH.ARPA
I recently received the following request from a friend in North
Carolina:
We are in the process of starting a worker-owned cottage
industry here in the mountains. The community involved
is composed largely of low-income, good mountain folks,
who want to work together but somehow don't quite make
it. It is interesting and satisfying to be part of such
a community. These folks may not be sophisticated, but
they are honest, `to a fault.'
The reason I mention this situation to you is that we
are seriously considering an approach that we call a
`Computer Coordinated Community.' We think that, by
having computers in most of the households, it might be
possible to communicate more effectively. There are
about 450 households in the watershed and it is
difficult to get folks together because of habit and the
relatively large distance between houses. There is no
industry in the township and `tobacco' is less and less
viable as a money crop. . . . What think you about such
things?
I have no experience of small networks of microcomputers. Assuming
these good folks all have phones and can get grant money for the
equipment, I suppose they could tie in to an existing public network,
and perhaps even find some way of sequestering their local traffic,
but the ongoing fees present a problem: I doubt they will be able to
support very much ongoing financial overhead. There have to be better
solutions.
Bruce Nevin (bn@bbncch)
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Date: Wed, 12 Dec 84 04:07 MST
From: "Glasser Alan%LSL"@LLL-MFE.ARPA
Subject: The Changeover to Compact Discs
Once the medium of compact disc storage and distribution
becomes widely available, then economically feasible, then
familiar, and finally popular, the changeover to this medium may
proceed along lines something like this. New works will be
produced in a variety of media, such as is now the case with
music on phonograph records, cassette tapes, and CD's. This will
introduce a Darwinian selection process in which market
preferences will determine the survival of the fittest. One
possible outcome is a continued survival of multiple media, each
serving a particular niche. Cheap paperback novels and weekly
newsmagazines may still be preferable on paper. Textbooks and
scientific journals would certainly be better on the more compact
and indestructable CD. If the advantages of the new medium
become truly overwhelming, the role of paper could become
analogous to that of reptiles in a world now dominated by
mammals. They still exist in a few small niches, but they're not
very important.
There is an additional incentive for the changeover to CD's
in the case of archival material such as big libraries of current
and old books and journals. It has only recently been recognized
that wood pulp paper chemically self-destructs after about a
hundred years, reducing itself to dust. This raises the specter
of losing our archives for the past hundred years. Cheap compact
discs and optical readers could solve this problem. It would
also vastly reduce the need for enormous buildings to house
libraries.
------------------------------
Date: Wednesday, 12 Dec 1984 17:31:14-PST
From: redford%doctor.DEC@decwrl.ARPA
Subject: compact disks versus books
A few comments on the compact disk versus book issue:
Does anyone know what the manufacturing cost for a paperback book
actually is? I suspect that it's under a dollar. All of the rest is
author's royalty, bookstore markup, publisher's cut, etc. . Disks
would have the same kind of add-ons. The Encyclopedia Britannica on
disk would cost something less than it does in paper, but not a whole
lot because most of its price is not in the manufacture.
A figure of $300 was quoted for the player. The average American
reads something like three or four books a year. If a player lasts
three years that works out to $30 per disk-book.
If you take a typical hundred thousand word novel and assume six
characters per word then that can be stored in about a half a
megabyte. If you take the cover art on the novel and assume that the
resolution is something like a thousand by thousand pixels with four
bits per pixel (a bit for each ink color), then again you get a half a
megabyte. Storing the cover would take as much space as the content!
Getting a hundred books at once on a disk is undesirable, since most
of them will be uninteresting. Why should the user pay the authors
for all the stuff that he or she doesn't like? The same problem
exists to a lesser extent with short story anthologies. Since only a
couple of stories are likely to be interesting, the rest are a waste
of money. Anthologies don't sell well as a result.
I've always found it easier to skim a book (or a printout) than to
skim a file. Even with the fast disks on our machines you can go from
one section to another in a listing faster than you can with even a
lightning editor. I think that's because books are organized in three
dimensions and files are organized in one. By going along the page
dimension you can step over tens of thousands of bytes a second. In a
file you have to go over those one at a time. I suppose that an
editor could be organized to put different pages on different tracks
of a disk to make for quick skimming. That would be exploiting the
two-dimensional nature of disk storage.
Isaac Asimov wrote a column some years back regarding the same issue
with video cassette players. He tried to imagine the perfect VCR. It
would have to be very cheap, of course. It should use almost no power
so that the user doesn't have to fool with batteries and line cords.
It should be portable enough so that the user can carry it casually
anywhere. It should be able to show the user scenes from any place or
time, with complete fidelity. Asimov concluded his magazine column by
saying "Such a player exists, in fact, you're holding one..."
John Redford
DEC-Hudson
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Date: Wed 5 Dec 84 13:54:29-PST
From: Hal Huntley <HAL@SRI-NIC.ARPA>
Subject: microchips of the future
The following article, appeared on pages 23-24 of the October 1984
issue of AMERICAN WAY (American Airlines' on-board-and-take-it-with-
you magazine).
"Shrinking the Microchip"
By Isaac Asimov
People my age can remember the first electronic computers, which
were as large as trucks and used even more energy than trucks.
However, computers have been shrinking ever since. Vacuum tubes
gave way to transistors, which shrank rapidly. Individual transistors
gave way to unified circuits and these, too, shrank and shrank until
we had the microchip. This is a small square of silicon on which the
etched circuits are so tiny they have to be viewed under a strong
lens.
The result is that we now have pocket computers that cost very
little, that run on small batteries or on exposure to light bulbs, and
that can do more things thousands of times faster than the first
computers could.
It makes one wonder what can be done for an encore. How can one
possibly devise computer components that are smaller than the
microchip? We might dismiss the possibility out of hand were it not
that there already exist computers with components far smaller than
the microchip, and that such computers have existed for a long, long
time. The most advanced variety is referred to as the human brain.
The human brain contains 10 billion elaborate nerve cells and about
90 billion subsidiary cells. Each one of these cells is, in turn, made
up of elaborate systems of billions of molecules including, in
particular, protein molecules. Even the largest molecules are
extremely tiny compared to even the smallest microchip.
Might we some day build computers with molecules serving as the
basic components -- with molecules storing and releasing data and
carrying through computations? Scientists are speculating on this
possibility.
Suppose one synthesized molecule hundreds of atoms long (large for
a molecule, tiny in comparison to microchips). Properly designed, such
molecules could exist in two very similar configurations. A tiny pulse
of energy striking one might travel the length of the molecule,
changing configuration number 1 into configuration number 2. A tiny
pulse at the other end might travel back and restore configuration
number 1.
Such molecules would act like switches, in other words, just as a
vacuum tube or a tiny transistor would, except that a molecular switch
could just barely be made out under an electron microscope.
Pulses of energy running along the length of a molecule and
changing the configuration are called "solitons." The phenomenon has
not yet actually been detected, but theoreticians seem to be
increasingly of the opinion that they can exist.
Then, too, there is the possibility of using carefully designed
protein molecules.
A protein molecule is built up of numbers of smaller molecules
called amino acids, strung together like pearls on a necklace. There
may be hundreds or even thousands of amino acids in a single protein
molecule, and they come in about 20 or so varieties. Each variety has
a different "side chain," some large, some small, some with a positive
electric charge, some with a negative electric charge, and some with
no charge at all.
Every different string of amino acids folds up in a different way
and produces a protein molecule of a characteristic shape and with a
characteristic pattern of electric charges upon the surface. Even a
slight change in the order of amino acids will produce a different
protein, so that the total number of different protein molecules
possible is far, far greater than the number of atoms in the
Protein molecules usually can exist in different conformations and
easily can change from one to another. In that way they can serve as
switches, or as memory-and-recall devices, or, in fact, should have
the ability to do anything molecules can do in the brain.
In the future it may be possible to design proteins of specific
shapes to perform different functions in computers. This may be done
by designing appropriate genes and inserting them into bacterial
cells. The bacteria will then proceed to produce quantities of the
desired proteins. We can visualize the computer technicians of the
future painstakingly supervising the growth of thousands of different
bacterial cultures.
With combinations of different proteins serving as the
"micromicrochips" of the future, we would begin an approach to
computers no larger than the human brain yet capable of feats
comparable to those of the human brain.
Such a"protein computer" won't necessarily be identical to the
brain, for it probably will be designed to deal with specific problems
and to demonstrate particular types of behavior. But they finally will
represent true cases of "artificial intelligence."
And once we have a molecular computer as compact and as complex as
the human brain, we can fill the cranium of a man-sized, man-shaped
robot and have it do the kind of things I have been writing about in
my robot stories of the past 45 years.
------------------------------
Date: 14 December 1984 01:47-EST
From: Steven A. Swernofsky <SASW @ MIT-MC>
Subject: [gerber: Steven Levy and HACKERS!]
MSG: *MSG 3517
Date: 13 Dec 1984 1808-EST (Thursday)
From: gerber at mit-athena (Andrew S Gerber)
To: bboard at mit-oz
Re: Steven Levy and HACKERS!
(Please do not contact me about this program, I'm only posting this as
a favor for former employers)
A CONVERSATION WITH STEVEN LEVY AND THE HACKERS AT THE COMPUTER
MUSEUM.
Steven Levy will be at The Computer Museum in Boston on Sunday,
December 16, 1984 to talk about his recently published book, "HACKERS:
Heroes of the Computer Revolution." He will be joined by "hackers"
from his cast of characters, the people whose insatiable desire to
create, explore and play with these miraculous machines eventually
took computers out of the laboratory and put them in American homes.
"A Conversation with Steven Levy and the Hackers" will begin at 3:00
p.m. on December 16 in The Computer Museum, Museum Wharf, 300 Congress
St, MA. Call 426-6758 for more information.
------------------------------
Date: Sunday, 2 Dec 1984 15:01:28-PST
From: goutal%parrot.DEC@decwrl.ARPA
Subject: side effect of unions
My wife and I agree that in general unions most probably were a
benefit to workers at some point in their history (or histories), but
that they are pretty much a bogus enterprise today.
My wife has raised an interesting point, however. She says that I, as
a computer professional, probably benefit indirectly from the
existence of the unions, and will continue to do so, even if my
profession is *never* unionized -- because the threat of unionization
is always there. The corporations know that they can probably keep
the programmers from organizing or joining unions if they treat them
properly, but that it's entirely possible that programmers *would*
unionize if not so treated. They know that it's probably too late to
do anything about steelworkers, auto workers, electricians, welders,
and so forth (barring what would amount to a revolution), but they
still have the option of dealing with the programmers on a productive
basis.
-- Kenn Goutal
Sun 2-Dec-1984 18:00 EST
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End of HUMAN-NETS Digest
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