Where are computers going?

[halox]

Just a thought. 12 year ago I was using an old IBM with dial-up. At the time it was a great computer and played the latest of games. Then I got another Dell Dimension 9150 with a 7800GTX GPU. It cost me £1500 back in 2005. It was the top of the range at the time. Looking back now and comparing it to what I have today, my old computers, although great at the time are only a fraction of what I now have. Will I look back on today's PC in 10 years time with the same thoughts?

I know PCB technology needs to change to have such a dramatic increase in performance over the next 10 years, as with the current technology it will hit a wall in the next few years. Perhaps Quantum computer's are the way forward. I dread to think how much those will cost. What about GPU's? Will my 1250W power supplies be enough? Back in my IBM the 300W PSU was huge at the time. Will we need 3 -phase supply's to run our PC's. Maybe nuclear fission reactor PSU's are the way forward?

Who knows? Only time will tell. I know something though. Prefixing gadgets names with the letter i is getting old and no longer means "quality". Perhaps a new letter is needed? What about a qphone or a qpad?

What about the download speeds? 12 years ago I was 4kb/s. Then a few years later I was on 2Mb/s. I am now on about 15Mb/s. Fibre is being rolled out in my street soon so I expect to get 50Mb/s by year end. In 10 years will it be 1Gb/s?

I remember watching a movie years ago, and a quote said by Dennis Hopper (Huey Walker) made me laugh. It turned out to be very true. "Once we get out of the 80's the 90's are gonna make the 60's look like the 50's". A great movie by the way. Its called Flashback, one of my all time fav movies.

Food for though!

 

[mantadog]

Things are moving in a different way to which they did in the last 10 years. Think of the revolution that was the tablet PC, an iPad now has more storage on it than my first computer could have dreamed of. I don't really need much more power in my desktop, but until recently you couldn't get much power into anything with a battery. Now tablets, phones and even watches or glasses can house powerful enough components to stream information from the cloud or a home computer.

Things like broadband speeds have to get faster, they will because that is just a matter of how much cable you want to run. Not sure about gigabit broadband in this country in 10 years, in most areas anyway, but Google and other tech companies will certainly roll it out to some places with a decent population.

Home based computers will continue to get faster or more efficient, they have a few years left in them yet. Think along the lines of SSD's, you just get more advanced controllers and more flash memory chips = faster speeds. If your talking more about CPU/GPU's then they will slowly tail off. But I'm sure new and funky solutions will be launched to keep the process driving forwards. Think cloud gaming, back in the day could you ever imagine gaming on your TV but the calculations being done in real time on a server somewhere?

We will get to a point where more powerful hardware requires more power than we can reasonably get, so it will be offloaded to server farms. It will (at some point) be faster to upload your 4k home movie from your £199 camcorder to a server farm, have it rendered with 100's of 20th gen GPU's and then re download it, than do it yourself.

I remember watching Tomorrow's World ageeeeesssss ago when they talked about being able to directly stream TV from the internet. I remember thinking, yeah good luck it takes me ages to download a picture it would take years to download a TV programme. But yeah sure enough 6-7-8 years later iPlayer comes on the go... I gave up predicting what will happen because i just cant imagine it.

 

[bigben]

Haha I can't imagine pcs are ever going to need 3 phase power. I reckon everything will get smaller and go the way of the tablet / smartphone as it's more convenient, I'm typing this on my phone because I can't be bothered to get up and sit at my desk or pull my laptop from under my bed...
It's definitely going to be interesting to see what cool new stuff gets introduced.

Going slightly off course, I'll be interested in what happens to vehicles. We bought a new merc sprinter at work and it has cross wind detectors which will automatically apply individual brakes to counteract the crosswind, which I reckon is very clever.
One of our drivers at work has a little camera for recording any incidents he has, it's about the size of a zippo lighter and it records in full hd, tracks where you are with gps and tracks how fast you are going. I think before long it will be compulsory to have one of those in every vehicle.

 

[ubuysa]

As many of you know I've been around computers of one sort or another for over 40 years now so you can probably imagine the changes I've seen. The cheap digital watch on your wrist for example has way more computing power than took man to the Moon, and my Optimus IV has about 100 times the processor power and 48 times as much RAM at the first mainframe I worked with, and that filled a large warehouse and was the biggest that IBM then made.

One thing I have never forgotten though I saw in a Horizon programme around 25 years ago. They were asking whether computers would ever run the world for us and whether we'd want them to. The general consensus from the (then largely computer illiterate) public was that they didn't mind if computers ran the world as long as they kept us informed of what they were doing. Then the programme turned to the computer techs and asked whether computers would be able to tell us what they were doing if they ran the world.

They imnagined two computers sitting side by side, fully connected together at the (then) current maximum data speeds (so we're probably talking about somewhere around 8Mbps). We'll call one computer Bill and the other Fred, they said, and we'll tap on the top of Bill and ask "Bill what are you and Fred talking about?". Now, at the data rates then in use, in the time between tapping on Bill and finishing asking your question, Bill and Fred will have said more to each other than all the people in the world will have said in the same time frame. So what is Bill going to tell you? You're not going to live long enough to hear the whole answer....

 

[mantadog]

As many of you know I've been around computers of one sort or another for over 40 years now so you can probably imagine the changes I've seen

This will undoubtedly come as a shock to many new people here who would never have guessed from your avatar that you were over 40 weeks, let alone 40 years (and a bit) Just to make you feel extra old, that episode of horizon you watched 25 years ago, I was 1...

On a side note, I always wonder what it would be like to take modern tech back to the days the same technology was invented. So say a Ford mondeo back to the days of the model T, a camera that can hold hundreds of thousands of full colour images back to the days the first cameras etc.

Would be pretty epic to hand NASA a laptop and say here you go boys try this bad boy. "what do you mean the OS is junk, its windows 8.1 its the best we have...."

 

[SpyderTracks]

There are so many new techs on the horizon and I think mobile computing is the way it's gonna go with always on cloud hosting.

Samsung has made revolutionary developments with graphene which means bendable circuitry and screens... LG are leading the way with 3d printing of television screens... IBM have developed the "learning node" cpu which is capable of storing commonly used calculations effectively making hardware Ai tangible... Google project "loon" will create a worldwide wifi network with balloons in the stratosphere which amazon are duplicating with drones... Intel have developed a fully capable pc the size of an SD card... Oculus Rift is taking true virtual reality mainstream with windows, Steam, android and ios support...

This is all stuff that's actually in development now, well probably see the fruits within 5 years. It's mind boggling how fast stuff is moving!

 

[ubuysa]

On a side note, I always wonder what it would be like to take modern tech back to the days the same technology was invented. So say a Ford mondeo back to the days of the model T, a camera that can hold hundreds of thousands of full colour images back to the days the first cameras etc.

As far as networking goes, my first experience was with a device called an acoustic coupler. It was a rubberised device into which you jammed (yes, literally) the telephone handset. It used the telephone as it's audio communication network and the acoustic coupler squawked and squealed into this thing at one end and listened to the noises coming out the other end. You had to be very quiet when it was communicating and you dare not touch the table on which it was sitting otherwise the noises you made would interfere with the comms. On a good day with a following wind and absolute silence at both ends we could get a very respectable 300 bits per second throughput.

I also remember well my first colour graphics system, we'd used green or black and white 24 x 80 text screens up until then. The one I saw was on a demo model we'd managed to borrow for the computer club I ran, this was sometime in the late 1970's. We didn't have any software we could run on the thing (it was an early all-in-one, computer and monitor combined) so we just ran a demo program they had on it that showed various images (still of course) in a continuous cycle. The resolution was probably 640 x 480 but it looked glorious to us in those days.

Back then home computers didn't have an OS (this is pre-IBM PC of course), just enough firmware to boot a BASIC interpreter (in EPROM) and that was it. I just cannot begin to image what we'd have thought back then if you'd put my Optimus IV in front of us. Laptops didn't exist at all then of course so that would have been the first shock, but thinking back to how massively impressed we were by that first colour graphics system I reckon we'd have felt like we'd died and gone to heaven to see my Optimus and Windows 8.1.

Actually I miss those early days, we really did get down and dirty then. We did know we were at the start of something big though, we always knew the technology would grow exponentially. But none us us would have dared suggest back then that something a sweet as my Optimus IV would ever exist.......

 

[bigben]

The resolution was probably 640 x 480 but it looked glorious to us in those days.

Haha imagine uses 640 x 480 now.. On a not so extreme level I remember going back to play some of the games I used to play back when I was a kid like Tomb Raider 3 (just to make you feel a little older, I was 5 when that game came out) and just finding them unplayable because the graphics were so pants I could barely make out what I was meant to be doing.

I think that the thing that is slowing down progress now is games consoles, they are releasing out of date technology and branding it next generation as you can see in the picture on this link - pathetic

 

[nathanjrb]

I remember dialing my mates computer and talking through his modem like a robot. Ah. Modems.

 

[Spuff]

Fibre is being rolled out in my street soon so I expect to get 50Mb/s by year end. In 10 years will it be 1Gb/s?

Would you not be able to get more than that, if you pay for it? I get 104.1 Mbps.
To be clear that is not megabytes per second, 104 Mbps equates to about 13 megabytes per second.

I often wonder what I would have thought if I had seen what we play now back when this seemed one of the pinnacles of game making, the animation of the rope in this screen was astonishing back then (made by a development team of one person):

(Jet Set Willy)

and this had the best ever graphics on the Spectrum:

(Fairlight)

 

[4ner]

Soon we will have a gadget on our arm which will hologram a screen which we control with our mind :0.

Or you could buy google glasses.

 

[ubuysa]

Soon we will have a gadget on our arm which will hologram a screen which we control with our mind :0.

I'm more worried that soon we'll have a gadget IN our arm that records everything we do, a bit like a black-box flight recorder for people. The police and government would love that......

 

[4ner]

I'm more worried that soon we'll have a gadget IN our arm that records everything we do, a bit like a black-box flight recorder for people. The police and government would love that......

Thought they already had that :0

 

[Spuff]

I think it's very difficult to see beyond announcements of the next product lines.

We have yet to find out what the impact of Oculus Rift and other VR will be. It could completely transform gaming, and other things, or it could just be a niche segment of the gaming landscape.
2016 could look very different to now - NVIDIA Pascal (which could also expand the high end gaming in smaller boxes area), DX12, VR - who knows where that will leave us?

I guess within our lifetimes it will be these incremental steps forward.
Maybe in 20 years time the graphics of now will look like the Spectrum graphics compared to now.

 

[Spuff]

Thought they already had that :0

Kevin Warwick's experiments show that you very much could make a data recording or transmitting implant.
I think ,though, that surgery is a step that most people would not want to take. Imagine that in the PCS drop down lists.

And to answer the thread title more directly:

 

[4ner]

Kevin Warwick's experiments show that you very much could make a data recording or transmitting implant.
I think ,though, that surgery is a step that most people would not want to take. Imagine that in the PCS drop down lists.

I meant that they are already spying on us. Through smartphones etc.

 

[mantadog]

I meant that they are already spying on us. Through smartphones etc.

yeah, they don't need to convince people to have an implant. All they had to do was convince everyone to carry around something that broadcasts your exact location and holds all your personal data on one place. Don't call it anything obvious though or people might catch on...

 

[mdwh]

Today's ARM-based tablets are a rebadging of the evolution of mobile devices like smartphones and media players that have been improving over the last 10-15 years, such devices have now become powerful compared to desktop computers or laptops of a few years ago. Never mind a big 10" ipad - even my old 3.2" Nokia 5800 had as much storage as my first x86 PC, and that was my old smartphone from a few years ago that's long been replaced. This is thanks to companies like Sandisk, who recently unveiled 128GB microSDs (I remember 10 years ago, someone showing a larger compact flash card, and we were marvelling at how such a small thing could hold 64 *MB* - now I store my entire music collection in something the size of a little fingernail).

I don't see that future computers will require more power, for most people things have been moving towards lower power CPU and GPUs. Complete system-on-chips will probably be much more common. Though it's possible that dedicated gamer graphics cards may continue to suck more power. It would seem rather depressing though if in 10 years' time, every other component of a computer can be fast, low power, and tiny, but we still need a massive power-hungry dedicated graphics card for the latest high end games...

Quantum computers aren't a replacement as such - they can solve certain problems that would take classical computers a long time to do, but aren't of any help for other things.

I never read "i" as "quality" (or "x" come to that), just a cheap marketing trick that some companies do when they can't think of a better name.

 

[ubuysa]

Today's ARM-based tablets are a rebadging of the evolution of mobile devices like smartphones and media players that have been improving over the last 10-15 years, such devices have now become powerful compared to desktop computers or laptops of a few years ago. Never mind a big 10" ipad - even my old 3.2" Nokia 5800 had as much storage as my first x86 PC, and that was my old smartphone from a few years ago that's long been replaced. This is thanks to companies like Sandisk, who recently unveiled 128GB microSDs (I remember 10 years ago, someone showing a larger compact flash card, and we were marvelling at how such a small thing could hold 64 *MB* - now I store my entire music collection in something the size of a little fingernail).

I don't see that future computers will require more power, for most people things have been moving towards lower power CPU and GPUs. Complete system-on-chips will probably be much more common. Though it's possible that dedicated gamer graphics cards may continue to suck more power. It would seem rather depressing though if in 10 years' time, every other component of a computer can be fast, low power, and tiny, but we still need a massive power-hungry dedicated graphics card for the latest high end games...

Quantum computers aren't a replacement as such - they can solve certain problems that would take classical computers a long time to do, but aren't of any help for other things.

I never read "i" as "quality" (or "x" come to that), just a cheap marketing trick that some companies do when they can't think of a better name.

Interesting comments, but your scenario supposes consumer-led development and that's not really what we've been seeing over the last 10 years. Apple in particular have made their name developing products and then convincing the masses that they need one, iPhone, iPod and iPad come to mind. None of those products were created because of a need, the need was generated by the products.

So whilst I think your thoughts on "system-on-chip" is probably fairly reasonable I think we'll continue to be led by manufacturers creating products we didn't know we needed and then marketing them in such a way that everyone wants one. Apple in particular know how important peer pressure is as a marketing tool. So I don't necessarily see the future unfolding as a logical extension of where we are now, sensible though that might be. The future is not what we think we might want but what the manufacturers want us to want. That's a whole different kettle of fish.

 

[mantadog]

I think we'll continue to be led by manufacturers creating products we didn't know we needed and then marketing them in such a way that everyone wants one

This hits the nail square on the head. People might broadly choose they like a certain type of device over another, but the must have thing will be invented by a corporation looking to make a profit.