The Implementation of Informal Supercomputing (2)
Way back when, say the 1970s, when corporations began taking advantage of computing power, one of the most widely used systems was the IBM 360. It was a mainframe computer that offered approximately 1/10,000% of what a good computer offers now-days, in terms of MIPS/$1,000. While we usually tend to idealize the past, little do we truly understand how drastic changes in the computing industry have been, and consequently (and oddy) how little has truly changed. We may observe that, if a single IBM 360 was used to run an entire financial institution, the latest computer model using an AMD processors could obviously be used for similar purposes. Hard drive space, chip size and speed, integrated circuits per processor have all grown logarithmically during last half century. Part of the problem, however, is that the desire for fancy graphics, even at the font level, drastically increases the minimum level of computational power needed to process information--amongst many other factors. It is surprising to consider that, despite all the could be done with computers pertaining to advanced calculations and communications, our desire to interact with a 'human world' (movies and music for example) takes up an inordinate share of processing power, memory and hard drive space. The newly vast computational power is increasingly used toward trivialities. It is like having a rocket that can take one to the outer ends of the solar system, but is only used to go to the local bakery. One could very reasonably suppose that if we would eliminate all of the extraneous information from software programming, for example by relying only on 'simple text' (green letters and numbers on a dark black screen, which took up much less memory and information) any normal 'computer' would truly be a 'super computer'. By trimming down the computational 'fat', we could truly create 'light' and 'fast running' computers. Alas, as with ourselves, the cheap prices of components have not created the incentive to genuinely optimize on the North American system--a "lesson" Latin American nations could benefit from.