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To: Dick Bachert
I was impressed by Watson's performance — until I considered that “he” consisted of 2,800 typical PCs wired together in about a 400 square foot room and, including his 12 tons of COOLING equipment, probably weighed around 10 tons and was competing with a human consisting of a 3# lump of specialized nerve cells called a brain which was fully portable and was self-cooling.

The old IBM 360 MAINFRAME computers that I used to work with took up more like 4000 square feet, had at least 12 tons of cooling equipment, probably weighed more than 10 tons.

A cell phone has more computer 'power' than those old mainframes.

We had two mainframes. One had 500k of memory, the other had 750k (WOOHOO!).

A cell phone has more computing power today than those old mainframes.

It may be a while before a computer can do ALL the things the BRAIN/MIND (whatever that is) can do, but I bet it won't be long before they 'shrink' the hardware they used to play Jeopardy down to something more reasonable in size.

15 posted on 02/19/2011 11:35:32 AM PST by UCANSEE2 (Lame and ill-informed post.)
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To: UCANSEE2

You may well be right given that in the early days of computers, some pretty savvy people said some pretty silly things:

“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.”
Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science,
1949

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

“I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and
talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data
processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.” The editor
in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957

“But what ... is it good for?” Engineer at the Advanced
Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the
microchip.

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their
home.” Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital
Equipment Corp., 1977

“640K ought to be enough for anybody.” Bill Gates, 1981


20 posted on 02/19/2011 7:23:59 PM PST by Dick Bachert
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