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Gary N. Boone gboone@cc.gatech.edu
Georgia Tech www.cc.gatech.edu/~gboone
The concluding paragraph from a non-technical article...
http://www.amsci.org/amsci/Issues/Comsci97/compsci9701.html
January-February 1997
Computing Science
Reinventing the Computer
Brian Hayes
Will the computer meet the same fate? Will it become an appliance or a
commodity? Will it, in other words, become boring? That's the direction
the industry is heading in, but I can see two glimmers of hope. The first
glimmer is institutional: Computer science, as a discipline, is gleefully
undisciplined; there is still plenty of willingness to explore the
occasional screwball idea. The second glimmer is theoretical: The computer
has a protean quality not shared by any other machine, certainly not by
automobiles and radios. Just about any computer can put on a convincing
impersonation of any other computer. This talent for emulation commonly
allows a fancy Macintosh or Unix workstation to masquerade as a
plain-vanilla Windows machine, but it can work the other way around as
well. Perhaps we will all end up with the most prosaic of computers, but
some of them may lead secret lives of adventure and romance.