From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!duke!mcnc!unc!brl-bmd!Pleasant@Rutgers.arpa Newsgroups: fa.human-nets Title: HUMAN-NETS Digest V6 #2 Article-I.D.: brl-bmd.505 Posted: Tue Jan 11 05:56:27 1983 Received: Thu Jan 13 03:45:02 1983 HUMAN-NETS Digest Monday, 10 Jan 1983 Volume 6 : Issue 2 Today's Topics: Queries - Where is Computing Going, Computers and People - Human Memory Capacity (4 msgs), Programming - Unix (5 msgs), News Articles - Forbes Year-end Issue (2 msgs) & Peninsula Times-Tribune ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 3 Jan 1983 1636-EST From: RonSubject: Re: Where is computing going? ["Don't ask me," he said stepping onto a nearby soapbox.] Parallels: Computing is moving into the hands of the masses in a way that probably exactly parallels radio/audio hobby and or automobiles. The bulk of people will want a model T average AM/FM tabletop home computer. A few lucky fanatics will own the computing equivalent of a Maserati (Xerox even named them similarly, "Dorado"). Just because of the greater exposure more people will eventually become hackers. The differences will remain: very few will build their own cars/radios/computers out of individual components, a few more will rebuild their cars/modify their radios/write complete software systems, and many more will buy high performance car parts/set up audio systems carefully/tweak software for best performance. The largest groups will: perform regular maintenance/buy replacement stylii when needed/read the manuals and try to understand, and finally the largest group of all will: barely remember where the gas filler is/know which one controls the volume/not remember if the computer came with a book. Computers will eventually be as easy as if not simpler to use than a video game. Ted Nelson has predicted word processors with an "attract mode." Looping magazines: I have a feeling that magazines will come full circle too. Lately some readers of Byte (and writer Sol Libes in his latest column there for instance) have lamented that computing is becoming more mass business oriented. Eventually serious hobby hackers will tire of what magazines like Byte are becoming. Somewhere the computer hackers equivalent of QST will spring up. Then we will come back to what Byte was like early on. Eventually businesses won't be so worried about how they buy computers; when the market is mature enough they'll be treated like typewriters and cabinets. When was the last time you saw a magazine devoted to typewriters or cabinets? Business computing is a new fad and the magazines of that fad will fade. What we'll get from hobbyists: Little work of interest to the average computer user will be done by hobby types. For instance, I won't write a super high performance accounts receivable package "for the fun of it." A game, I might write though. Perhaps after the industry matures some breakthroughs and interesting developments may still come out of hobbyists. We'll see. Generic computing: Computing for everyman will probably come closest to looking like radio/audio does now. Lots of users and a few fanatics. Disclaimer: Ah, and there it is, that little touch of enthusiasm that sets the computing hobby apart. Car enthusiasts might stay up all night working on their vehicles. Audio enthusiasts may wax poetic for a moment when they hear a new component. "Computer people," however, are insane. Read any account of a hackers' heaven: days without sleep or food, single-minded drive, etc. There is something deeply attractive about computing to the hobbyist. If anything will make this revolution different from all the others it lies somewhere in there. [Stepping off of soap box...] (ron) ------------------------------ Date: 5 Jan 1983 0945-EST From: Tim Subject: Re: Human Memory Capacity DMRussell mentioned that "there are some psychologists that believe that memory capacity is truly infinite!! I don't know what rock they crawled out from...)". I am curious. Now that you have essentially equated these psychologists with salamanders, how would you go about formally proving that human memory capacity is not infinite? Note that I am not willing to make any assumptions at all about how memory works. [By the way, please do not Reply to me, personally. Reply to Human-Nets. I will mail a copy of the Interlisp manual to the first person who replies to me.] Twinerik ------------------------------ Date: 3-Jan-83 12:45:34 PST (Monday) From: CharlieLevy.es at PARC-MAXC Subject: Human Memory Capacity There are some branches of psychology and holistic health (Reichian therapy, Radix therapy, Rolfing (Structural Integration), Postural Integration) that believe that ALL the body cells store memories, not just those of the brain. In fact, in the latter bodyworks, working on muscles, etc., that have been affected by memories (especially emotional traumas) can trigger the re-experiencing of these traumas, with resultant emotional benefit. ------------------------------ Date: 1 Jan 83 11:53:59-EST (Sat) From: Henry Dreifus Subject: HUMAN-NETS Digest V5 #113 Re: Memory Capacity It matters not, as we cannot build proper indexing to retrieve all of which we store throughout our lives. Henry Dreifus ------------------------------ Date: 1 Jan 83 15:34:16 EST (Sat) From: Mark Weiser Subject: human memory capacity The estimates of this always start with an estimated 6,000,000,000 neurons in the brain. From there, it used to be one would say: "Each neuron can be firing or not firing, and therefore represents a bit, so the human brain has a maximum capacity of 6 trillion bits." Now it turns out that neuron activity is pulse-code modulated, so each neuron is actually transmitting a rather complex signal and not just "on" or "off". Furthermore, it has been discovered that neurons interact not just at dendrite and axons ends but also at all sorts of intermediate sites. Therefore, the potential for interaction and parallelism even within a single neuron is also much higher. Finally, neurons also talk (and presumably store) with chemical signals (not just neurotransmitters), so this raises the potential communication and storage even more. That's for an upper bound, and I have never seen an estimate which takes all this more recent information about neuron function into account. >From all of the above must be subtracted presumed redundancy for reliability, neurons which are not used for storage but only processing, and the possibility that the neuron is not the basic unit of processing at all but something like the "cell assembly" is (cell assembly= group of neurons capable of self-sustaining activity). And last of all, human memory capacity really ought to include our ability to manufacture paper and pencils and use language to extend our brain's internal capacity. This ability is certainly part of our human capacity. So the real answer is that human beings are like Turing machines: our memory capacity is finite but unbounded. ------------------------------ Date: 6 January 1983 22:38-EST From: Robert Elton Maas Subject: UNIX user interface I find it strange that it would be better to provide a piece of shit (virgin Unix) because it forces system maintainers to modify it to their local preferences, instead of a halfway-decent system (Unix with somebody else's mods) where the local system maintainers might then get lazy and leave it as is instead of change it. First of all, for those with a low budget and immediate needs to be productive, what's wrong with somebody else's modified system. If you are lazy, at least the system will be usable, and if not you'll eventually get around to modifying it further. Of course the mods that somebody else made shouldn't be frozen into it, and grungy incompatible unstructured fragile mods shouldn't be distributed even if somebody else loves them, because that kind of mod makes it hard to add anything new without breaking something in obscure ways. But nice clean mods that most customers like, like not having ctrl-D logout immediately, really ought to be available in new systems as purchased, providing they're reasonably compatible with most other changes that might want to be made. This is all my naive opinion, that most users will in the long run be happier getting a good system and making it better or different instead of getting a raw system with no niceties and being forced from day one to modify it to get any use out of it all. I may be wrong. ------------------------------ Date: 7 Jan 1983 10:54 EST From: clark.wbst at PARC-MAXC Subject: Re: UNIX user interface O.K....What you say makes sense. Perhaps a good way to do it would be to provide a system which is good by SOMEBODY'S standards and point out exactly what has been done to make it that way, so that the new UNIX user can see what there is to change. This provides an immediately usable system, yet the new user, often confused and overwhelmed by the countless details of a new system, will be able to see what is easily changed and what is not. It would also probably be a good tool for learning about the system, including many of the things a new user needs to ask a guru at first, only would be more complete than such ad-hoch questions and answers. By the way Bob, could you send me a copy of the digest my remark came out in ? My gateway was down and I never got it. Thanx. --Ray ------------------------------ Date: 7 Jan 1983 1721-PST From: Dolata at SUMEX-KI10 at SU-SCO Subject: VAX VMS vs UNIX I need to find a good concise comparison between VAX VMS and UNIX. I have used UNIX on a PDP11/70, but have never used VMS. Among the points I need to consider are; utility for the hacker, ease of use for the non-hacker, utility programs available, etc... I directed this query to HUMAN-NETS because I remember such a discussion took place here several years ago. If this information is archived, I would appreciate a pointer. Please send this directly to me as I am not a HUMAN-NETS subscriber any longer. Thanks Dan (dolata@sumex-ki10) ------------------------------ Date: 31 Dec 82 11:34:17 EST (Fri) From: Andrew Scott Beals Subject: UNIX(tm) vs TOPS-20 I, too am guilty of `it isn't unix(tm)', but I do have other objections to bottoms-20. Firstoff, C is the best systems implementations language that I've seen. It is clean and concise (I'm also an APL fan...). Personally, the handiest thing about unix(tm) (I'm trying to beat this joke into the ground...) is that I have the COMPLETE system source code at my fingertips. I can easily write spies of any nature (providing that I can read kmem), and modify any systems program to work more to my liking, and have no problems in using it. I was started on unix(tm) and bottoms-20 in the same manner - here's how you login, go. I find the unix(tm) programmers' manual (man) entries to be much more helpful than bottoms-20's help function. Unix(tm) is only flakey if you don't know what to expect, and do stupid things. -andy ------------------------------ Date: 1 Jan 83 15:48:31 EST (Sat) From: Mark Weiser Subject: Unix Initial State To respond to the complaint about the Unix initial state being bad and that is an argument against Unix: Many things have poor initial state, and their great strength is their customizability. In the computer world there is Emacs, elsewhere there are human babies. You'll have to use a better argument than this against Unix. Also, Unix is NOT slow. Comparisons of the latest Berkeley release against VMS show they are approximately equal. ------------------------------ Date: 30 Dec 1982 9:57-PST From: dietz.usc-cse at UDel-Relay Subject: Forbes Year-end Issue Reply-to: dietz at Usc-Ecl The year-end issue of Forbes magazine has a series of short (one to two page) summaries of what's happening in the various areas of the economy. I found the electronics and computer summaries very interesting. Some things that stick in my mind: (1) The computer business is no longer driving electronics because chip density is increasing so fast. What used to take 50 to 100 chips now only takes a few. (2) The computer industry is about to enter a new phase in which the price of cycles will drop dramatically. A Bell Labs person forecasts that the price will be down to one dollar per MIPS by the end of the decade! This is something like a four (five?) order of magnitude decrease in price. (3) Prices of personal computers (and soon others?) are already being driven down very fast. Computers are becoming a commodity. The article included a graph showing the recent steep decline in PC prices, especially in the low end of the market. If true, the implications are profound. What could we do with, say, 1 GIPS of personal computing power? Voice understanding, image understanding/synthesis, high power CAD, simulation, really smart robots... ------------------------------ Date: 4 Jan 1983 11:33-PST From: dietz.usc-cse at UDEL-RELAY Subject: Previous message... Arg! That Forbes article actually said that the price/performance ratio will improve by one order of magnitude, not four. Sorry for the error. ------------------------------ Date: 5 January 1983 01:46-EST From: Robert Elton Maas Subject: Personal computers used now in newspaper writing In today's (Jan 04) Peninsula Times-Tribune (on page E1) there's an article by Freiberger/Markoff (I don't know which of them wrote this particular article) telling how soon computers will be embedded in other devices, especially the telephone, and describing the kinds of modems presently available. At the end it says: 'This column was begun on a portable Osborne computer, sent by telephone to an IBM personal computer where it was edited and then retransmitted to a computer at the Times Tribune. Maybe that's what they mean when they say, "Let your fingers do the walking."' This would seem to go one step beyond what we heard about a couple years ago about some big newspaper on the East Coast, where the reporter on the West Coast transmitted stories via telephone directly to the newspaper's computer. ------------------------------ End of HUMAN-NETS Digest ************************