Computers Are Magic
Sunday 18th September, 2016 12:48 Comments: 0
I've been watching Halt and Catch Fire on Amazon and it annoys me slightly when they introduce modern concepts to the past. Also, I feel like I should be able to see their screens flickering. However, watching the show reminds me of how far things have progressed over the last decade. A couple of decades ago I'd stare at a chunky CRT monitor, trying not to shake the massive desktop computer in case I damaged the hard disk. Resolutions were low. Videos were even worse and took up an entire CD. MP3 made it possible to store music files, but sometimes they'd stutter when you play them. Only having one single-core CPU was standard but also quite a limitation. Dual CPU systems were fairly uncommon, but then again so we're firewalls. Security involved running antivirus software as you ran everything else as an administrator. Encryption wasn't something people really talked about.
Okay, so not all of that has changed. Many people still use administrator accounts to do everything. Music can still stutter but mostly because we're streaming higher quality music over a mobile connection. Many people have given up storing music on their device. Most people have more than one device too. They all have multiple cores. Their screens are flicker-free and ridiculously thin and/or large, somehow squeezing 1080p resolutions into the palm of your hand - it probably won't be long before 4K becomes the norm. With solid state media you can drop your phone on the floor and the only thing that might happen is the screen could crack (especially if you're an iPhone user) or you dent the plastic.
Some of these things feel like magic. It's amazing to be able to see, hear, and do so much from the mobile phone in my hand, without it being physically connected to anything. I can't really imagine what will happen in another twenty years, I can only guess at what may or may not take off. In twenty years' time will we have fixed the problems of unencrypted email and websites, or will we have moved on (backwards?) to applications to communicate with each other? Will we replace screens with augmented reality? Will big data and AI completely replace traditionally manual tasks such as investments? Will we continue to progress, or will we regress like in Asimov's Foundation series of books?
Okay, so not all of that has changed. Many people still use administrator accounts to do everything. Music can still stutter but mostly because we're streaming higher quality music over a mobile connection. Many people have given up storing music on their device. Most people have more than one device too. They all have multiple cores. Their screens are flicker-free and ridiculously thin and/or large, somehow squeezing 1080p resolutions into the palm of your hand - it probably won't be long before 4K becomes the norm. With solid state media you can drop your phone on the floor and the only thing that might happen is the screen could crack (especially if you're an iPhone user) or you dent the plastic.
Some of these things feel like magic. It's amazing to be able to see, hear, and do so much from the mobile phone in my hand, without it being physically connected to anything. I can't really imagine what will happen in another twenty years, I can only guess at what may or may not take off. In twenty years' time will we have fixed the problems of unencrypted email and websites, or will we have moved on (backwards?) to applications to communicate with each other? Will we replace screens with augmented reality? Will big data and AI completely replace traditionally manual tasks such as investments? Will we continue to progress, or will we regress like in Asimov's Foundation series of books?