barrett@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Dan Barrett) (02/14/91)
In article <849@caslon.cs.arizona.edu> dave@cs.arizona.edu (Dave P. Schaumann) writes: >no matter >how fast your machine, how big your memory, sooner or later your application >will outgrow it. It is good to bring up this point every now and then. People's thinking about computers is sometimes limited by the available hardware. Suppose I told you that I want a word processor in which every typed character is a 3-dimensional image, ray-traced in REAL TIME, complete with beautiful shading, etc., so there is absolutely no eyestrain looking at it. And the background "engine" of the word processor is actually a real-time LaTeX. "You're dreaming!" people would say. Indeed, but someday the computing power will be available. "You don't need it!" other people would shout. Well, I don't "need" a monitor with resolution greater than 200x200 monochrome either, but I prefer something better. :-) Here's another example. I want my graphics program to be able to save its data to a file (say, 500 megabytes) INSTANTANEOUSLY. I don't want to wait AT ALL; just press the "save" button and it's saved to a 100% error-free disk with NO WAITING. Is a 100-gigabyte-per-second transfer rate impossible? Now, yes. But eventually...? Ten years ago, people thought < 256K RAM was plenty. >Those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it. I think I've heard that somewhere before, but I'm not sure. :-) Dan //////////////////////////////////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ | Dan Barrett, Department of Computer Science Johns Hopkins University | | INTERNET: barrett@cs.jhu.edu | | | COMPUSERVE: >internet:barrett@cs.jhu.edu | UUCP: barrett@jhunix.UUCP | \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\/////////////////////////////////////