Listening in the chatterbox, I was inspired by Nevtlathiel's question "Why would one ever need two machines running the same OS?" to write this ode to progress.

As I sit here, I've got a FreeBSD machine running a 3.8GHz processor and 2G of DDR RAM. It's running Gnome as fast as my old boxen used to run FVWM 1.24. ;-]

Two gigabytes of RAM... DAMN!

When I started, we made punch decks for our high school's downtown IBM 360. In college, we waited overnight for our printout as run as a batch job on a CDC 7600.

In 1986, Intel 8080A/64K/360K floppy iPDS luggables were the bleeding edge because they had plug-in chip emulators that could monitor microcontroller data registers in real time. In 1988, I used 286 PCs in place of the custom Intel jobs, and once had a dual-286 passive-bus PC-like machine running DOS and a C program acting as a daisy-chain serial bus 'server', another regular 286 hosting a Periscope watching the first one, an 8051 security system keyboard with an emulator plugged in, another PC to host the emulator and my assembler, linker and editor, and yet another PC running a serial snooping monitor watching the serial bus. Hmmm, that's only 4 PC's.... I remember six at one time, so there were probably some more, but you get the idea.

Today, my one BSD box has more DRAM than all of the machines in that whole department had RAM and disk combined! It's just finished CVSup from a FreeeBSD.org mirror and is now happily make buildworlding away with four threads going. At the same time, I've got a window into our test lab's machine open with a 'is there new data?' perl script (there, see? this IS Perl related!) ready to alert me of more updates from the testers. I've got two other desktops full of emacs windows and terminals with tail and other goodies ready for me to get back to work on two completely different projects' worth of code, and in my dropdowns this one machine has a complete productivity suite, 3D graphics, morphing, image manipulation, and access (through X and the ethernet) to all the chip design and sim programs in our department's systems.

I'm not even going to speculate. There's a lot of work going on with optical interconnect now (including here) and MEMS; bio-neural interfaces are starting to actually work, and IPv6 is going to let us connect a heckofalot more little machines into one mesh. As Jeff Harrow says, "Don't blink!"

In reply to multi-PC tasking by samizdat

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