July 9, 2002
Power to the People's Computers ... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes".
Broadly speaking, the history of computers runs something like this: The 50's and 60's spawned the large mainframe computers that forever changed banks and big corporations. From there, things got both bigger and smaller.
The 70's produced the first super-computers, capable of massive scientific calculations, as well as mini-computers, the first step down from the mainframe.
The 80's brought us personal computers, and from there, information technology really took off. Networking emerged, and new models of bigger, faster, cheaper chips rolled out of semi-conductors plants every few months instead of every year.
The 90's gave us cell phones, PDA's, laptops and the World Wide Web. And something else happened, too. Anything you bought could well have a chip in it; intelligence became a part of all the products we used.
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At the same time, the top tier of supercomputing didn't stop evolving. Science has always had a voracious appetite for numbers, and today there are high-powered supercomputers all over the world. Frequently one-of-a-kind, they take advantage of the best chip technologies to build computers that exactly match the problem they want to solve.
Now, the reason I am telling you all this is that for years we've focused on the hardware to tell the history of computers, but that can be very misleading.
Let's take Napster. Many look at this as an exercise in teenagers getting free music that they should have paid for. But in a real sense, Napster at its peak was the world's largest music computer.
Did you ever ask yourself, why the music industry didn't just load all the music onto some big computer and get all the kids to pay for it? Well, did it occur to you that there is no single computer configuration with sufficient storage, computing power and access capability to service such a demand?
Napster solved the problem when all the kids (and plenty of adults, as well, I might add) loaded music onto their pc's and left them running all night. With their computers on, anyone who wanted to could download music. Even asleep in their beds, their computers were chunking away, participating in the largest exchange of music ever known on the planet.
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In the Napster case, the network was larger than any computer system we could build. In fact, you might very well say, the network was the computer.
And there are other examples, as well. Consider the technique that uses your screen saver to get a little scientific work done on the sly. You download a packet-of-data, and when your screen saver kicks in, your computer goes to work. A little bit here, a little bit there, and before your know it, your computer's done and feeding the answers back up the line.
SETI@home has employed this technique for several years to analyze radio telescope data it receives from space. Thus far nearly 4 million people have contributed nearly 500 million results, and this is while their computers would otherwise be doing nothing.
While not all computer applications lend themselves to these solutions, from now on, the network of our computers together have possibilities beyond what's possible for any single computer we are capable of building.
If you remember the sixties, you'll remember: "Power to the people." Let's rephrase that. How about "Power to the people's computers."
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
