Your Next Computer
Newcastle Herald
Tuesday June 19, 2007
MANCHESTER, the rain-sodden northern English city that kick-started the digital era which put a computer in almost every home in the Western world, may just be getting ready to take them all back again.
The city is preparing to trial a new type of home computer network next year that in some ways is going back to the future.In the years after World War II researchers in Manchester won the race to develop the first form of "synthetic memory" which we now call RAM allowing construction of the world's first real digital computers.The room-sized boxes of valves and wires may have had less power than one of today's talking McHappy meal toys (how does 2048 bits of RAM sound?) but they were a start.For many years most computers remained large mainframes with remote terminals, until the early 1980s brought personal processing power into homes.Now computers have invaded the world, but that conquest has been far from efficient.It's estimated your average home computer uses only about 5 per cent of its available computing power. From an environmental perspective it is inefficient to have under-utilised processors and storage devices in every home.The system to be trialled next year will have low-tech "dumb" access points basically just a display, a keyboard and network connection that do none of their own work; they store and process their programs and data on powerful central computers.Many such systems are already in use, but the Manchester trial by a group called the Green Shift Taskforce will test if the public is willing to use such a system in the home.Some have expressed a reluctance to trust their irreplaceable holiday snaps and other personal effects to a central computer, but there are many advantages. Aside from the system's cheapness and power saving it would use 98 per cent less electricity the central computer would be maintained by experts, meaning home users wouldn't have to worry about dealing with viruses or software and hardware upgrades.
© 2007 Newcastle Herald