<story><title>“There Is No Reason for Any Individual to Have a Computer in Their Home”</title><url>https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/09/14/home-computer/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simonh</author><text>&amp;gt;Gaming is maybe the one mainstream application where local compute is important.&lt;p&gt;There are a ton of things our smartphones and tablets do that rely on very high levels of local computing power.&lt;p&gt;Biometric authentication such as face and fingerprint recognition is a heavily compute intensive application. It needs to be done locally in order to be secure. Face ID is just nuts.&lt;p&gt;Modern smartphone photography is heavily compute-intensive, from HDR to optical zoom to image editing and markup. Just look at what Apple is doing with portrait mode and lighting effects. I love using time-lapse and slow-motion video modes. What would instagram and snapchat be without locally applied filters?&lt;p&gt;Note taking, address book and time management. The notes apps on modern mobile devices are multi-media wonders with integrated text, image and handwriting recognition built-in. Calendar management, alarms and notifications all rely on local processing even if they do make use of cloud services. Without local smarts those services would lose a huge chunk of their utility.&lt;p&gt;Document and media management. I read eBooks and listen to podcasts. My ebook reader has dynamic font selection, text size adjustment and will even read my books to me. Managing media on the device is essential as contemporary networks are still nowhere near good enough to stream everything all the time. My podcast app has sound modulation and processing options built in to tailor the sound to my tastes and needs, including speed up, voice level adjustment and dead-air &amp;#x27;vocal pause&amp;#x27; elimination in real-time, all on-device and adjustable at my fingertips. That&amp;#x27;s serious sound studio level stuff in my pocket.&lt;p&gt;Playing digital video files. Even ones downloaded or streamed. So what if we&amp;#x27;ve had it since the 90s. It&amp;#x27;s still proper computation, especially with advanced modern codecs. VOIP and video calling even between continents have also become everyday and absolutely rely on powerful local number crunching.&lt;p&gt;These things have become so everyday that we hardly notice most of them, but without serious on-device processing power, some of which would have been beyond $10k workstations just 15 years ago, none of this would be possible.</text></item><item><author>gregmac</author><text>&amp;gt; To understand the mindset of this period it is important to recognize the distinction between a computer terminal and a free-standing computer. Some experts believed that individuals would have terminals at home that communicated with powerful remote computers providing utility-like services for information and interaction. These experts believed that an isolated computer at home would be too under-powered to be worthwhile.&lt;p&gt;Considering how the majority of the general population&amp;#x27;s use of &amp;quot;computers&amp;quot; is really interacting with remote and cloud services (Facebook, Netflix, etc) this is a valid argument today. While today&amp;#x27;s equivalent of terminals (phones, tablets, and even PCs) have a significant amount of local computing ability, for the most part they really are just used as fancy terminals. Gaming is maybe the one mainstream application where local compute is important.&lt;p&gt;The other quote that stuck out to me was this:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; “The personal computer will fall flat on its face in business because users want to share files and want more than one user on the system,”</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>com2kid</author><text>&amp;gt; My podcast app has sound modulation and processing options built in to tailor the sound to my tastes and needs, including speed up, voice level adjustment and dead-air &amp;#x27;vocal pause&amp;#x27; elimination in real-time, all on-device and adjustable at my fingertips.&lt;p&gt;Everything short of the vocal pause stuff an old Sansa will do for you, running a tiny embedded C based runtime.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; These things have become so everyday that we hardly notice most of them, but without serious on-device processing power, some of which would have been beyond $10k workstations just 15 years ago, none of this would be possible.&lt;p&gt;The modern photo and video stuff is super cool and uses a ton of processing power. Likewise for high quality video streaming, decompressing is hard work, though often offloaded to HW these days.&lt;p&gt;Everything else my desktop of 15 years ago handled just fine, with 256MB of RAM.&lt;p&gt;Heck my smartphone in 2006 with 64MB of RAM did most of this stuff.&lt;p&gt;The one thing that has remained constant across a decade of smart phone development is the Pandora app getting forced closed all the time.</text></comment>
<story><title>“There Is No Reason for Any Individual to Have a Computer in Their Home”</title><url>https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/09/14/home-computer/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simonh</author><text>&amp;gt;Gaming is maybe the one mainstream application where local compute is important.&lt;p&gt;There are a ton of things our smartphones and tablets do that rely on very high levels of local computing power.&lt;p&gt;Biometric authentication such as face and fingerprint recognition is a heavily compute intensive application. It needs to be done locally in order to be secure. Face ID is just nuts.&lt;p&gt;Modern smartphone photography is heavily compute-intensive, from HDR to optical zoom to image editing and markup. Just look at what Apple is doing with portrait mode and lighting effects. I love using time-lapse and slow-motion video modes. What would instagram and snapchat be without locally applied filters?&lt;p&gt;Note taking, address book and time management. The notes apps on modern mobile devices are multi-media wonders with integrated text, image and handwriting recognition built-in. Calendar management, alarms and notifications all rely on local processing even if they do make use of cloud services. Without local smarts those services would lose a huge chunk of their utility.&lt;p&gt;Document and media management. I read eBooks and listen to podcasts. My ebook reader has dynamic font selection, text size adjustment and will even read my books to me. Managing media on the device is essential as contemporary networks are still nowhere near good enough to stream everything all the time. My podcast app has sound modulation and processing options built in to tailor the sound to my tastes and needs, including speed up, voice level adjustment and dead-air &amp;#x27;vocal pause&amp;#x27; elimination in real-time, all on-device and adjustable at my fingertips. That&amp;#x27;s serious sound studio level stuff in my pocket.&lt;p&gt;Playing digital video files. Even ones downloaded or streamed. So what if we&amp;#x27;ve had it since the 90s. It&amp;#x27;s still proper computation, especially with advanced modern codecs. VOIP and video calling even between continents have also become everyday and absolutely rely on powerful local number crunching.&lt;p&gt;These things have become so everyday that we hardly notice most of them, but without serious on-device processing power, some of which would have been beyond $10k workstations just 15 years ago, none of this would be possible.</text></item><item><author>gregmac</author><text>&amp;gt; To understand the mindset of this period it is important to recognize the distinction between a computer terminal and a free-standing computer. Some experts believed that individuals would have terminals at home that communicated with powerful remote computers providing utility-like services for information and interaction. These experts believed that an isolated computer at home would be too under-powered to be worthwhile.&lt;p&gt;Considering how the majority of the general population&amp;#x27;s use of &amp;quot;computers&amp;quot; is really interacting with remote and cloud services (Facebook, Netflix, etc) this is a valid argument today. While today&amp;#x27;s equivalent of terminals (phones, tablets, and even PCs) have a significant amount of local computing ability, for the most part they really are just used as fancy terminals. Gaming is maybe the one mainstream application where local compute is important.&lt;p&gt;The other quote that stuck out to me was this:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; “The personal computer will fall flat on its face in business because users want to share files and want more than one user on the system,”</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Theodores</author><text>Years ago when I had a VAX to work with, the terminal was happy with user name and password. Your supercomputer phone might have classy iris scanning stuff but it is merely unlocking the terminal. Okay there is no remote authentication to it but it is the same conceptually.&lt;p&gt;Everything else apart from things like the clock are client server.</text></comment>