When will we not be waiting on computers?
This is a very cool video about the history of computing. It is definitely worth watching. I watched it yesterday while I was waiting on a virtual image to copy over the network. In it they talk about the speed of the processors and the great increase we have had over the years. Whoopee… NOT!!!!
For the past 15 years I have been spending a lot of my time sitting and waiting on computers.
I started by waiting on chips to be burnt and compilers to compile. That was before our beloved internet.
After the internet came about I was waiting to get my turn to log into my BBS. At the time my job was fixing pixels in images for a publisher, where I waited on images to rip across the network and for the files I was working on to painfully update on the Sytex machines we were using at the time. When I got home I would sit and dial and re-dial for hours to get on.
Then came AOL. Hours, upon hours, upon hours, of waiting on technical help on a weekly basis.
Then came dial up and access to the real internet. One of my early contracts required me to use Oracle 8. One weekend I downloaded it over dialup. It took 3.5 days and a lot of arguing with my family about the phone lines being tied up for so long.
Web sites were a wonderful thing. I cannot even fathom a guess at how many hours I spent waiting on publishing to complete.
So then machines started getting faster and faster, but the internet didn't. So waiting and waiting on downloads became an almost daily thing.
Today I am downloading on a 1 Gig connection. But now I am using entire virtual systems to do my work. I spent last night zipping one of my current Virtual image into a rar. That only took 7 hours. I had to do it to make room for my new downloads.
Now today I get to download 9 700 MB files to my portable hard drive through my USB, so I can spend an hour or so unzipping them. My computer's hard drive is full of other virtual images that I also need, so that is why I have to put this onto my portable drive. The image will not be running very fast from there, so I will get to check out Orcas and Acropolis in a nice very slow environment. I figure nice and slow will be good. That way I won't miss anything :-) This is about the 4th or 5th time I have gone through this exercise.
I can't tell you how many times I have defragged and compacted virtual images or how many hours I waited while doing it.
It is a marvelous era we are in, but I can't see a future where we as programmers will not spend a considerable amount of our time waiting on our buddy the computer to finish what it is doing.
Luckily there is still the old fashion book for me to read while waiting. But if you watch the video I point to at the beginning of this blog, you will see that we may soon be holding a piece of plastic instead.
For the past 15 years I have been spending a lot of my time sitting and waiting on computers.
I started by waiting on chips to be burnt and compilers to compile. That was before our beloved internet.
After the internet came about I was waiting to get my turn to log into my BBS. At the time my job was fixing pixels in images for a publisher, where I waited on images to rip across the network and for the files I was working on to painfully update on the Sytex machines we were using at the time. When I got home I would sit and dial and re-dial for hours to get on.
Then came AOL. Hours, upon hours, upon hours, of waiting on technical help on a weekly basis.
Then came dial up and access to the real internet. One of my early contracts required me to use Oracle 8. One weekend I downloaded it over dialup. It took 3.5 days and a lot of arguing with my family about the phone lines being tied up for so long.
Web sites were a wonderful thing. I cannot even fathom a guess at how many hours I spent waiting on publishing to complete.
So then machines started getting faster and faster, but the internet didn't. So waiting and waiting on downloads became an almost daily thing.
Today I am downloading on a 1 Gig connection. But now I am using entire virtual systems to do my work. I spent last night zipping one of my current Virtual image into a rar. That only took 7 hours. I had to do it to make room for my new downloads.
Now today I get to download 9 700 MB files to my portable hard drive through my USB, so I can spend an hour or so unzipping them. My computer's hard drive is full of other virtual images that I also need, so that is why I have to put this onto my portable drive. The image will not be running very fast from there, so I will get to check out Orcas and Acropolis in a nice very slow environment. I figure nice and slow will be good. That way I won't miss anything :-) This is about the 4th or 5th time I have gone through this exercise.
I can't tell you how many times I have defragged and compacted virtual images or how many hours I waited while doing it.
It is a marvelous era we are in, but I can't see a future where we as programmers will not spend a considerable amount of our time waiting on our buddy the computer to finish what it is doing.
Luckily there is still the old fashion book for me to read while waiting. But if you watch the video I point to at the beginning of this blog, you will see that we may soon be holding a piece of plastic instead.
posted by tadanderson at 7:30 AM
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