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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vrecknidj" data-source="post: 2926966" data-attributes="member: 7301">In 1980 I bought my first computer.  I used a cassette tape machine and a black-and-white television for storage and display.  If I wanted to do word processing, I first had to write the code for a word processor application, and then run it.  In 25 years, we've moved a long way.  If the computing power continues along this exponential curve, in 25 more years the computing power will rival that of the human brain, only its memory will be much more reliable and its ability to process what we'd call "conscious" tasks will be much greater.If you plot a graph where the x-axis is the year, and the y-axis is time measured in hours-to-days, and then graph the time it takes to get from London to New York, you'll see something interesting.  If you go back to, say, the 1400s, and then move forward in 50-year increments, the time it takes starts to slowly go down until the 19th century and the time curve takes an inverted-exponential curve.  What used to take months later took weeks, then later took days, and then later took hours.  I don't know that we'll get it down to minutes within my lifetime (okay, the space shuttle can get across the Atlantic in minutes, but I'm talking commercial travel), but it could happen.I'm thinking that between 20 and 40 years looks about right--with the usual proviso that the major cities of the world aren't radioactive junkyards.Dave</blockquote>

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