TL 9 microchips?

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by RyanW

To be honest, I only know of it through osmosis. By the time I was reading anything that could be considered a novel, Neuromancer was no longer be current but not yet retro.

And didn't an IBM engineer claim in the 1950s that six (or some other comically small number) of their latest computer would have all the computing power the world would ever need?

So the legend goes, I don't know if it's true or apocryphal.

Originally Posted by whswhs

That's my stance as well. I've been using Mac Minis pretty much since they first came on the market. I have an iPad and an iPhone, but I don't allow either of them to receive or send e-mail; if people have an urgent message they can text me (though even for texting, I find it much easier to send a text from my desktop using a proper keyboard).

I sometimes read this forum on a tablet or a smartphone, but I almost never attempt to post with one, it's more trouble than it's worth unless you trick it out with external keyboards, etc., more-or-less turning it into a desktop, as others have noted on-thread. When I post I usually use my desktop PC. For some purposes it's still superior to either the tablet or smartphone.

But that's also the usual story, one expression of a given tech rarely entirely replaces another, and mainframes, desktops, smartphones, etc. are all expressions of the same basic technology.

We've been hearing for years, for ex, that mainframe computers are a thing of the past...yet they remain an economic/business viable product to manufacture and are the best solution for certain applications. Also, some 'replacements' of mainframes turn out to be networked assemblages of blade servers or the like which more or less approximate a mainframe.

Sometimes it comes down to terminology.