October 13, 2024
andy
A long time ago….
A long time ago a computer was a woman (I think almost exclusively a women, not a man) who was employed to do a lot of repetitive mathematics – typically for accounting and stock / order processing.
Then along came Lyons, who deployed an artificial computer to perform the same task, only with fewer errors in less time. Modern day computing was born – we had entered the age of the Digital Computer.
These computers were large, consumed huge amounts of power but were precise, and gave repeatable, verifiable results.
Over time the huge mainframe digital computers have shrunk in size, increased in performance, and consume far less power – so much so that they often didn’t need the specialist CFC based, refrigerated liquid cooling systems of their bigger mainframe counterparts, only requiring forced air flow, and occasionally just convection cooling. They shrank so far and became cheep enough that the Personal Computer became to be, replacing the mainframe with its time shared resources with a machine per user. Desktop or even portable “laptop” computers were everywhere.
We networked them together, so now we can share information around the office, a few computers were given specialist tasks of being available all the time so we could share documents, or host databases these servers were basically PCs designed to operate 24×7, usually more powerful than their desktop counterparts (or at least with faster storage and networking).
Next we joined these networks together and the internet was born. The dream of a paperless office might actually become realised – we can now send email (and documents) from one organisation (or individual) to another via email. We can make our specialist computers applications available outside just the office and web servers / web apps come of age.
Fast forward a few years and all of a sudden we need huge data-halls filled with “Rack scale” machines augmented with exotic GPUs and NPUs again with refrigerated liquid cooling, all to do the same task that we were doing previously without the magical buzzword that has been named AI; because we all need another dot com bubble or block chain band waggon to jump aboard. Our AI enabled searches take slightly longer, consume magnitudes more power, and best of all the results we are given may or may not be correct….
Progress, less precise answers, taking longer, consuming more power, without any verification and often giving a different result if you repeat your question AND we still need a personal computing device to access this wondrous thing.
Remind me again why we are here?
(time lines and huge swaves of history simply ignored to make an attempted comic point – this is intended to make a point and not be scholarly work)