jmg@dolphy.UUCP (Intergalactic Psychic Police Of Uranus) (10/30/85)
*** Final Scene In A Life Of Tragedy *** (Apologies if this is twice posted) Several responses to my computer skin article take up the theme of addressing the basic ugliness of nearly all computers - their socialized visual, sculptural content which emphasises mysterious workings that no lay-man could understand, and thus a priestly set who has the Knowledge to work with or tend to these huge and powerful 'entities'. There were no marketing departments for the first computers and it is these computers that have set the monolithic style that we follow and are responding away from today, for their makers massive ego's are reflected in those equally sized, maniacally sculpted works. They made a machine exactly as they wished, or, in the case of its appearance, as naively and revealingly as they did. But this is only the skin, I want to shift the conversation down into the organs... (And, I'll be a brief and (sadly) less humorours). Marketing departments have a far better sense of what is important in a computer than we tend to think, largely because they aren't strapped with an over-involvement with the trivialities that we deal with in putting a computer together. On the other hand, they are far overbalanced in their sensitivity to surface and to the trivialities and details (and psychic manipulations) of their work. The question is, can we take a more 'global' look at computer architecture and still make machines (or want to?). In the case of hardware, it is almost invariably described in terms of data-as-river flowing by channels into boxes, as if a small agricultural unit is being developed: nature is constrained for our use; memory is our soil and its there for the taking - everyone gets the same sized plot; the farmhands are there for us, they have no life of their own, etc. Now, I like data-as-river, but the rest I don't like. I'd like to see someone build a 'slow' computer, with VHSIC built like lakes, where you didn't always have 'easy' access, and when you finally got on it was worth it - where time doesn't pass like a dream and suddenly it's 4am, and where a culturally impoverished notion of work didn't require the architectures that we have now - squeezing so little out of so little. "I'm a sex machine" - James Brown Jeffrey Greenberg ihnp4!allegra!phri!dolphy!jmg Where 'pipelining' really means better drainage.