by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We return to the era of the main computer center and waiting for computer time.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Way back in the previous millennium, I was leaving graduate school. While in school, I had access to a new 32-bit minicomputer (I think it was made by Perkin-Elmer if anyone else remembers that time). One problem was I had to be sitting in the computer room of our lab to use the minicomputer. I didn’t have to sign up for time on the machine as I was a chosen student and given access anytime I was awake. Still, I had to make the drive to the building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then I bought my on personal computer. It only had 16-bit words. It only had 640K of RAM. It only ran MS-DOS. It was only this and only that and only lots of things. The difference was that I owned it and it sat in my home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I could run the software I was developing anytime I wanted. The software was limited by all the “only this and only that” of the computer, but it ran now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When was the last time you had to sign up for computer time and had to wait your turn? I had to do so last week. My credits, or whatever they call them, on my chattering bot account ran out. I pay $20 a month, but there is a limit to how much I can chatter and agent and loop. When I hit the limit, I have to wait until Thursday morning to do anything. (Why Thursday? A mystery of the universe that remains a mystery.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once again, there is the big computer that runs everything fast \u2014 when it is my turn. And I guess I can run a chattering bot locally, but slow, but now, but slow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We have come a long way and it took a long time to return to where we started.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Dwayne Phillips We return to the era of the main computer center and waiting for computer time. Way back in the previous millennium, I was leaving graduate school. While in school, I had access to a new 32-bit minicomputer (I think it was made by Perkin-Elmer if anyone else remembers that time). One problem […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[469,454,83,367,3,35,292],"tags":[470,455,200,366,126,157,295],"class_list":["post-4683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-cloud-computing","category-computing","category-history","category-technology","category-time","category-tools","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-cloud-computing","tag-computing","tag-history","tag-technology","tag-time","tag-tools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4683"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4684,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4683\/revisions\/4684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}