Voodoo Time Dot Com

I just put in an order for a new Macintosh iBook at work today. Apple has seen the light and has rebuilt their operating system so that it is now Unix-based. That makes Macs cool enough now for me to want one. And working in the IT department of a large international company affords one the luxury of playing with cool toys from time to time. So, I’ll have an iBook for my own use in about a week from now, and then I probably will have lost it within two weeks from now.

Seriously, if you haven’t seen Apple’s notebook computers lately, they are roughly the size and shape of a child’s coloring book. The things are really tiny. I tend not to use lots of tiny gadgets because I tend to drop and lose tiny gadgets. The trouble is, with the exception of SUVs and Chinese children, everything in the world is getting smaller. Cellular phones once weighed over a pound. Now they are so tiny that you can’t tell if the guy talking to himself on the street is important or just insane. Televisions used to be enormous wooden boxes that dominated the family room. Now you can get one that hangs on your wall like a painting (at about the same price as a Van Gogh, incidentally).

Similarly, computers used to require entire buildings to house them, and had less computing power than a calculator I had in high school. My PDA is more powerful than any one of the five computer systems on each space shuttle. Some guy has, evidently, hacked his Gameboy into a web server. At this rate of miniaturization, I fully expect to see moderately powerful computers the size of dice within 15 years.

There is an idea called Quantum Computing that is generating rather a lot of research. Very basically, the idea is to use subatomic particles to do calculations. These particles exist at several different energy states. So instead of 1 and 0 (on and off), we would have 1, 0, and something in the middle. It doesn’t sound like much, but it has the potential to increase computing power something like a billion percent or more. And since we’re talking about subatomic particles here, you’re looking at a computer that could conceivably ride through the air on a speck of dust. This disturbs me for two reasons. First, the possibility exists that humankind could eventually live in an environment chock full of microscopic airbourne computers. Second, there is no chance I could ever keep track of a computer that small.

Still, tiny computers could offer us a wealth of information. They could be used to monitor the weather and give us storm warnings at the slightest stirrings of a warm Atlantic breeze. They could be used to watch complex chemical interactions. They could even be used in medicine. Imagine, instead of an uncomfortable and invasive endoscopy, merely taking a capsule filled with tiny computers that travel through your body collecting information for your doctor.

However, let’s hope they’re not running Windows. It could be the first medicine in history that gives you more viruses than it cures.

Bye for now.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 25th, 2002 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.