Aug 03
Familiars are like external hard drives for their wizards, sharing knowledge and memories.
In real life, it’s pretty amazing that computer processing and memory seems to double every two years or so. I still recall playing with an IBM PC Jr back when I was very small. I remember when my dad upgraded it from its normal 128k memory to 256k. It had 4.77 MHz processing.
That was about 20+ years ago. Now toasters and microwaves have more processing power and memory.
I can’t imagine what sort of computers we’ll have around 20 years from now. Direct interface with our brains? I imagine touch screens will be everywhere. Visors that project a video screen directly into our retinas? Everything will have a website and able to be accessed online, from takeout to family doctors. I bet the DMV site will still take forever though.
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When I was in college in the late 1970′s I had a student job as the video tech in the video department. The head of the department personally bought a TRS-80 computer (the top end model, with 16k memory rather than the standard 4k) but kept it in the video studio. I spent many hours when I wasn’t checking out or maintaining the video equipment teaching myself how to program, as well as many more hours on my own late at night – as the video tech I had a key to the video studio.
My magnum opus was a text based dungeon crawl. Because of memory constraints, I had to write it in two parts. The first part generated the dungeon and populated it with monsters and treasure. It was weighted towards putting the better loot and tougher monsters farther in, though you could occasionally get lucky and find a nice haul close to the front or get unlucky and find a fierce monster right by the entrance.
The second part would generate your character, let you buy equipment with your starting gold (or upgrade for later forays if you made it out alive), and track you through the dungeon, springing traps and monsters when appropriate.
The “Trash-80″ had a cassette tape drive storage system. You’d load part 1 in on cassette, run it, and put a new cassette in for it to save the generated dungeon to, switch tapes back to run part 2, which would then prompt you to switch back to the dungeon tape for you to run the dungeon crawl.
The peculiar thing is, you needed to load in the dungeon twice. The first time, none of the variables were changed from their initial zero state. The second time, everything updated just fine. I poured over my source code to find the bug that caused this – but no success.
I was frustrated that I couldn’t find the source of the problem, but as it *did* work fine as long as you loaded in the dungeon twice, I eventually gave up and left it at that – claiming that the computer was “possessed by demons.”
Months later, the video professor got a technical note from Radio Shack, advising that there was a bug in the ROM that could cause a problem if a particular set of circumstances happened — which of course is just what I had stumbled into.
So in a sense I had been right – the computer WAS possessed by demons.
Heh.
I never used a computer with casette tapes. I’ve never even seen them (other than in old 80s films).
The oldest computer storage devices I’ve used were 5″ floppies and cartridges.
For me it was a Commodore PET in 1978…. and yeah…. cassette tape. If you play them via audio, they sounded just like a modem. Of course people will soon forget what modems sound like to I suppose.
They’ll also forget what cassettes were soon enough. Imagine asking your kid what an 8 track was when she starts knowing stuff, Streep. It’s a brutal world when we remember things our kids do not. My parents remember LPs, 8 tracks, and Atari 2600 and so do I. My kid wouldn’t know what an LP, 8 track or Atari 2600 was if I didn’t tell him.
As to the computers of the future…we’re about at the end of life of the current computer model. It’s one of the reason the semi-conductor industry is stabilizing into a new baseline with the recession. Notice there hasn’t been an actual new chip, we’ve just started doubling and quadrupling them aka dual core and quad core from Intel (forget what AMDs were called). There’s no real reason to continue trying to bump processor speed with what we have now, the other items already don’t keep up…right now, it’s moving forward to miniaturization in an attempt to be able to utilize multiple processors instead of faster processors…your desktop is already a server basically, your laptop is becoming one…the ATOM chips give your 10 year old a laptop for school and everything except games, movies and music.
In Japan, they have already prototyped and showcased a computer that is just a small stand that projects the keyboard in front of it and the video using laser imaging, so we’re already moving towards what you suggest Cedric. Medical facilities are already experimenting with computer chips embedded between the brain stem and the spinal cord for nerve disorders like Parkinson’s, etc with the chip acting to transfer the correct signals from brian to central nervous system……the future is kind of scary while also amazing.