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Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Slow PC? Try This Scan
My laptop runs very slowly. I've tried all manner of different scans and diagnostics, on the hard disk and other components -- with very little improvement.
I've been kind of at a loss, and have really just learned to live with it -- until now.
I've now learned about a free registry cleaner that starts with a quick scan to see if the problem could be that I need a clean registry on my computer. I know what you're asking yourself now, "What is my registry?"
Most of us have never heard of it, but the windows registry is part of the operating system that sits deep in Windows and basically is a database of all of the options and settings on your computer. Apparently, like your hard disk and other components, your registry needs occasion tidying up.
Want to know more? Click on these links here to learn more and start your scan.
We all know how anti-virus scanners have made protecting your computer pretty much a hands-off proposition. The software performs its own scan, makes repairs, even updates itself.
What if a quick automatic scan could help make handling another computer chore just as easy. I'm talking about keeping your Computer Drivers updated. You know drivers -- those little bits of software, like Sound Drivers and Video Drivers -- that control all the key parts of your PC or laptop. If you don't have exactly the right driver software, and if its not up-to-date, you'll find your computer silent, unable to print, or worse.
You can spend all night hunting for the CDs that came with your computer, or all day prowling the Web looking for the driver you need. If those searches come up empty, well, then what?
Or skip all that, and automate your driver systems through a quick scan that updates a variety of drivers so you never find your computer half dead ever again. Click on the links above to learn more.
Materials Researchers Say Rebooting Soon May Be Thing Of Past
The ferroelectric materials found in today's "smart cards" used in subway, ATM and fuel cards soon may eliminate the time-consuming booting and rebooting of computer operating systems by providing an "instant-on" capability as well as preventing losses from power outages.
Researchers supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) nanoscale interdisciplinary research team award and three Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers at Cornell University, Penn State University and Northwestern University recently added ferroelectric capability to material used in common computer transistors, a feat scientists tried to achieve for more than half a century. They reported their findings in the April 17 journal Science.
Ferroelectric materials provide low-power, high-efficiency electronic memory. Smart cards use the technology to instantly reveal and update stored information when waved before a reader. A computer with this capability could instantly provide information and other data to the user.
Researchers led by Cornell University materials scientist Darrell Schlom took strontium titanate, a normally non-ferroelectric variant of the ferroelectric material used in smart cards, and deposited it on silicon--the principal component of most semiconductors and integrated circuits--in such a way that the silicon squeezed it into a ferroelectric state.
"It's great to see fundamental research on ordered layering of materials, or epitaxial growth, under strained conditions pay off in such a practical manner, particularly as it relates to ultra-thin ferroelectrics" said Lynnette Madsen, the NSF program director responsible for the Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team award.
The result could pave the way for a next-generation of memory devices that are lower power, higher speed and more convenient to use. For everyday computer users, it could mean no more waiting for the operating system to come online or to access memory slowly from the hard drive.
"Several hybrid transistors have been proposed specifically with ferroelectrics in mind," said Schlom. "By creating a ferroelectric directly on silicon, we are bringing this possibility closer to realization."
More research is needed to achieve a ferroelectric transistor that would make "instant on" computing a reality, but having the materials in direct contact, free of intervening reaction layers, is an important step.
Supercomputer Provides Massive Computational Boost to Biomedical Research
In less time than the blink of an eye, the Translational Genomics Research Institute's new supercomputer at Arizona State University can do operations equal to every dollar in the recent Wall Street bailout.
That would be 700 billion computations in less than 1/60th of a second, says Dan Stanzione, director of the High Performance Computing Initiative at ASU's Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering.
The "Saguaro 2" supercomputer, housed on the first floor of ASU's Barry M. Goldwater Center for Science and Engineering, is capable of 50 trillion mathematical operations per second.
"That's the equivalent of taking a calculator and doing one operation per second, by hand, continuously for the next one and a half million years," Stanzione says.
Although the computing world changes daily, and measurements depend on numerous factors, Stanzione said, for some functions, ASU's new computer may be among the top five in the world.
TGen will need that speed as it continues its research into a variety of human diseases through the use of data-rich DNA sequencing, genotyping, microarrays and bioinformatics.
"This is really a remarkable testament," to the cooperative efforts of ASU and TGen, says Jeffrey Trent, president and scientific director of TGen, especially in a tight funding environment.
The new supercomputer will help TGen's efforts in translational biomedicine, developing new therapies targeted for individual patients suffering from Alzheimer's, autism, diabetes, coronary heart disease, melanoma, pancreatic cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer, multiple myeloma, and breast cancer.
Edward Suh, TGen's Chief Information Officer, says a joint TGen-ASU computer support team is being assembled, and he urged the creation of more partnerships between TGen and ASU.
"I am confident this new supercomputer system will help the ASU and TGen scientists expedite their research, and accelerate innovation in biomedical and engineering research," Suh says. "It is my hope to see this supercomputer system, and a supporting informatics program which Dan and I are putting together, bring the ASU and TGen scientists closer than before for even greater success."
Saguaro 2 – a partially water-cooled set of 7-foot-tall black monolith computer racks, each with as many as 512 processor cores, and linked by ultra-high-speed Infiniband cables – was funded in part by a nearly $2 million grant in July by the National Institutes of Health. The grant was in response to a wide range of scientific activities proposed by TGen, the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering, and ASU's BioDesign Institute.
The new system doubles the capabilities of ASU's High Performance Computing Initiative (HPCI). The system consists of Intel microprocessors, servers from Dell, storage from Data Direct Networks, and components from a number of other partners, including fiber optic cables from Phoenix-based Zarlink.
More importantly for TGen, the new system has 20 times the previous computational power available to TGen researchers, says James Lowey, director of TGen's High Performance Biocomputing Center.
The new supercomputer also adds to the storage capacity of the HPCI, bringing the total storage to 1.5 quadrillion bytes, or 1.5 petabytes -- or 15 followed by 14 zeroes (1,500,000,000,000,000). That's enough storage space to record nearly a quarter million DVD discs.
The world’s largest computing grid is ready to tackle mankind’s biggest data challenge from the earth’s most powerful accelerator. Today, three weeks after the first particle beams were injected into the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid combines the power of more than 140 computer centers from 33 countries to analyze and manage more than 15 million gigabytes of LHC data every year.
The United States is a vital partner in the development and operation of the WLCG. Fifteen universities and three U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories from 11 states contribute their power to the project.
“The U.S. has been an essential partner in the development of the vast distributed computing system that will allow 7,000 scientists around the world to analyze LHC data, complementing its crucial contributions to the construction of the LHC,” says Glen Crawford of the High Energy Physics program in DOE’s Office of Science. DOE and the National Science Foundation support contributions to the LHC and to the computing and networking infrastructures that are an integral part of the project.
U.S. contributions to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid are coordinated through the Open Science Grid, a national computing infrastructure for science. The Open Science Grid not only contributes computing power for LHC data needs, but also for projects in many other scientific fields including biology, nanotechnology, medicine and climate science.
“Particle physics projects such as the LHC have been a driving force for the development of worldwide computing grids,” says Ed Seidel, director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure. “The benefits from these grids are now being reaped in areas as diverse as mathematical modeling and drug discovery.”
“Open Science Grid members have put an incredible amount of time and effort in developing a nationwide computing system that is already at work supporting America’s 1,200 LHC physicists and their colleagues from other sciences,” says Open Science Grid Executive Director Ruth Pordes from DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
Dedicated optical fiber networks distribute LHC data from CERN in Geneva, Switzerland to eleven major “Tier-1” computer centers in Europe, North America and Asia, including those at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. From these, data is dispatched to more than 140 “Tier-2” centers around the world, including twelve in the United States.
“Our ability to manage data at this scale is the product of several years of intense testing,” says Ian Bird, leader of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid project. “Today’s result demonstrates the excellent and successful collaboration we have enjoyed with countries all over the world. Without these international partnerships, such an achievement would be impossible.”
“When the LHC starts running at full speed, it will produce enough data to fill about six CDs per second,” says Michael Ernst, director of Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Tier-1 Computing Center. “As the first point of contact for LHC data in the United States, the computing centers at Brookhaven and Fermilab are responsible for storing and distributing a great amount of this data for use by scientists around the country. We’ve spent years ramping up to this point, and now, we’re excited to help uncover some of the numerous secrets nature is still hiding from us.”
Physicists in the U.S. and around the world will sift through the LHC data torrent in search of tiny signals that will lead to discoveries about the nature of the physical universe. Through their distributed computing infrastructures, these physicists also help other scientific researchers increase their use of computing and storage for broader discovery.
“Grid computing allows university research groups at home and abroad to fully participate in the LHC project while fostering positive collaboration across different scientific departments on many campuses,” says Ken Bloom from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, manager for seven Tier-2 sites in the United States.
'Rochester Cube' Points Way to More Powerful Chip Designs
The next major advance in computer processors will likely be the move from today's two-dimensional chips to three-dimensional circuits, and the first three-dimensional synchronization circuitry is now running at 1.4 gigahertz at the University of Rochester.
Unlike past attempts at 3-D chips, the Rochester chip is not simply a number of regular processors stacked on top of one another. It was designed and built specifically to optimize all key processing functions vertically, through multiple layers of processors, the same way ordinary chips optimize functions horizontally. The design means tasks such as synchronicity, power distribution, and long-distance signaling are all fully functioning in three dimensions for the first time.
"I call it a cube now, because it's not just a chip anymore," says Eby Friedman, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rochester and faculty director of the pro of the processor. "This is the way computing is going to have to be done in the future. When the chips are flush against each other, they can do things you could never do with a regular 2D chip." Friedman, working with engineering student Vasilis Pavlidis, says that many in the integrated circuit industry are talking about the limits of miniaturization, a point at which it will be impossible to pack more chips next to each other and thus limit the capabilities of future processors'. He says a number of integrated circuit designers anticipate someday expanding into the third dimension, stacking transistors on top of each other.
But with vertical expansion will come a host of difficulties, and Friedman says the key is to design a 3-D chip where all the layers interact like a single system. Friedman says getting all three levels of the 3-D chip to act in harmony is like trying to devise a traffic control system for the entire United States—and then layering two more United States above the first and somehow getting every bit of traffic from any point on any level to its destination on any other level—while simultaneously coordinating the traffic of millions of other drivers.
Complicate that by changing the two United States layers to something like China and India where the driving laws and roads are quite different, and the complexity and challenge of designing a single control system to work in any chip begins to become apparent, says Friedman. Since each layer could be a different processor with a different function, such as converting MP3 files to audio or detecting light for a digital camera, Friedman says that the 3-D chip is essentially an entire circuit board folded up into a tiny package. He says the chips inside something like an iPod could be compacted to a tenth their current size with ten times the speed.
What makes it all possible is the architecture Friedman and his students designed, which uses many of the tricks of regular processors, but also accounts for different impedances that might occur from chip to chip, different operating speeds, and different power requirements. The fabrication of the chip is unique as well. Manufactured at MIT, the chip must have millions of holes drilled into the insulation that separates the layers in order to allow for the myriad vertical connections between transistors in different layers.
"Are we going to hit a point where we can't scale integrated circuits any smaller? Horizontally, yes," says Friedman. "But we're going to start scaling vertically, and that will never end. At least not in my lifetime. Talk to my grandchildren about that."
Computer Scientists Develop Solutions For Long-Term Storage of Digital Data
Although the digital age is well under way, one crucial detail remains to be worked out--how to store vast amounts of digital information in a way that allows future generations to recover it.
"The problem is how to build a large-scale data storage system to last 50 to 100 years," says Ethan Miller, associate professor of computer science in the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Tape libraries are widely used for data storage, but digital tape has many shortcomings as an archival medium. Miller's group has come up with a new approach, called Pergamum, which uses hard disk drives to provide energy-efficient, cost-effective storage. The declining cost of hard drives has made them more competitive with tape, and they offer numerous advantages for searching and retreiving data. "It's like the difference between a VCR and TiVo," Miller says.
Pergamum, named after the ancient Greek library that made the transition from fragile papyrus to more durable parchment, is a distributed network of intelligent, disk-based storage devices. The team that developed it includes UCSC graduate students Mark Storer and Kevin Greenan, along with researcher Kaladhar Voruganti of NetApp (formerly Network Appliance), a company that focuses on storage and data management solutions.
Archival storage is a big issue for businesses, partly due to legal requirements for the preservation of financial and business records, and also because data mining strategies can turn stored data into a valuable resource. Long-term storage is also a growing issue for individuals who are filling their personal computers with digital photos, movies, and documents.
"There is a risk that an entire generation's cultural history could be lost if people aren't able to retrieve that data," Storer says. "Everyone is switching to digital cameras, but we've never demonstrated that digital data can be reliably preserved for a long time."
Pergamum has attracted a lot of attention from industry since Storer presented it at a leading conference in the field, the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '08), held in San Jose in February. Robin Harris, an industry consultant who writes an influential blog called StorageMojo, called the Pergamum paper his "favorite FAST '08 paper)."
The researchers designed the system to provide reliable, energy-efficient data storage using off-the-shelf components. It also has the ability to evolve over time as storage technologies change. "You want to avoid 'forklift upgrades,' where you have to get rid of the old system and transfer all your data to a whole new system," Miller says.
According to Storer, businesses are beginning to recognize that archival storage is very different from simply backing up their data. "A backup is a safety net--you hope you won't need it. Archival data you do want to use--it's a valuable resource and you want to be able to mine it for information," he says.
Tapes work well for backups, in which data are written once, rarely read, and not kept indefinitely. But archival data should be easy to read, query, browse, and search, and tape has inherent weaknesses in these areas. Existing disk-based systems offer excellent performance, but rely on power-hungry central controllers.
"Energy usage is a big issue, so a lot of our effort in designing Pergamum focused on dramatically reducing power use," Miller says.
Pergamum uses individual building blocks consisting of a hard drive; a small, low-power processor (like the chip in an iPhone); a flash memory card; and an ethernet port. These units, called "tomes," are connected using relatively inexpensive ethernet switches.
"Each tome is like a minicomputer, but with very low power demands," Miller says. "When not in use, it can shut down almost completely."
Even when active, the devices use very little power (less than 13 watts), which can be delivered over the network using Power over Ethernet technology. As a result, each unit is essentially a self-contained box with a network connection. The flash memory provides low-power, persistent storage so that many operations can be performed without activating the hard drive.
For reliability, Pergamum uses two levels of redundancy--within and between disks--to protect from both disk failures and errors in writing data to a disk (so-called "latent sector errors"). Tomes can be easily added to expand the system or to replace failed disks. And if hard disk drives become obsolete in 10 years, Pergamum won't suffer the same fate. The system doesn't care what the actual storage medium is, as long as the device can implement the simple protocol that will allow it to function as part of the network.
"In 50 years, the devices might use holographic storage," Storer says. "As long as you can wrap the new storage medium in this intelligent layer that speaks the protocol, it can participate in the network."
Future Of Computing -- Carbon Nanotubes, Superconductors to Replace Silicon Chip
The silicon chip, which has supplied several decades’ worth of remarkable increases in computing power and speed, looks unlikely to be capable of sustaining this pace for more than another decade – in fact, in a plenary talk at the the Institute of Physics’ Condensed Matter and Materials Physics conference, Suman Datta of Pennsylvania State University, gives the conventional silicon chip no longer than four years left to run.
As silicon computer circuitry gets ever smaller in the quest to pack more components into smaller areas on a chip, eventually the miniaturized electronic devices are undermined by fundamental physical limits. They start to become leaky, making them incapable of holding onto digital information. So if the steady increases in computing capability that we have come to take for granted are to continue, some new technology will have to take over from silicon.
Replacing the chip with carbon nanotubes
At the conference, researchers at Leeds University in the UK will report an important step towards one prospective replacement. Carbon nanotubes, discovered in 1991, are tubes of pure carbon just a few nanometres wide – about the width of a typical protein molecule, and tens of thousands of times thinner than a human hair. Because they conduct electricity, they have been proposed as ready-made molecular-scale wires for making electronic circuitry.
Some nanotubes behave as semiconductors, like silicon; others carry electric currents like metal wires. Already, fundamental elements of computer circuits such as transistors have been made from individual carbon nanotubes.
But the problem is arranging nanotubes into circuit patterns. One particular difficulty is that they are typically made as mixtures of metallic and semiconducting tubes, whereas just one type or the other is needed for a specific component. These electrical properties depend on the precise arrangement of carbon atoms in the nanotube, but that’s hard to determine for single tubes.
Bryan Hickey and his coworkers at Leeds have now developed a technique that will reveal an individual nanotube’s structure (and thus its electrical properties), and then allow it to be placed in a position on a surface with an accuracy of about 100 nanometres, a fraction of the width of a human blood cell. The nanotubes are grown on a perforated ceramic grid, and tubes lying across the holes are examined in an electron microscope to deduce their atomic structures. Then the researchers use two needle-fine tips like tweezers to pick up a single tube under the microscope and put back down on another surface.
Chris Allen, one of the Leeds teams, says, “With this technique we can make carbon nanotube devices of a complexity that is not achievable by most other means.”
Boosting computer power with superconductors
Two further talks at the meeting will describe an even more dramatic way to overcome the limitations of silicon computers. Hans Mooij of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and Raymond Simmons of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, USA, will claim that superconductors – materials that conduct electricity with zero electrical resistance – can harness the power of quantum physics to boost computer power tremendously.
So-called quantum computers have become one of the hottest items in physics over the past decade. They attempt to improve on the power of silicon not by making components smaller but by exploiting the counterintuitive principles of quantum mechanics, the theory generally used to understand how objects behave at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles.
Objects governed by quantum theory can be in several different states at once, like a light switch being simultaneously ‘on’ and ‘off’. These ‘superposition’ states don’t correspond to anything familiar from our everyday world, but countless experiments have proved that they can exist so long as the quantum objects are not disturbed by, for example, making a measurement on them. In a quantum computer, the equivalent of ‘bits’ that hold binary information as 1’s and 0’s in today’s computers will be quantum bits or qubits, which can also exist as superpositions of 1’s and 0’s. This massively increases the amount of information that can be encoded in a quantum computer’s memory. The catch is that superpositions are extremely delicate and hard to maintain, especially in memories containing large numbers of qubits that interact with one another.
Various candidates for making qubits are being explored, such as magnetically trapped atoms or nanometre-scale blobs of semiconductors. But it has long been recognized that loops of superconducting material can also be placed in quantum superposition states, and thus act as qubits. Here the quantum states may correspond to an electric current circulating round the ring in one direction or the other. (In superconductors this circulation can continue more or less indefinitely without petering out, because there is no electrical resistance.)
At the conference, Simmonds will describe the first demonstration of information being transmitted between two such superconducting qubits. This shows that elements of this kind can act as a quantum-computing memory and a “bus” for qubits to communicate with one another, an essential requirement of any working computer.
SETI@home Ramps Up to Analyze More Data in Search of Extraterrestrial Intelligence
The longest-running search for radio signals from alien civilizations is getting a burst of new data from an upgraded Arecibo telescope, which means the SETI@home project needs more desktop computers to help crunch the data.
Since SETI@home launched eight years ago, the project based at the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory has signed up more than 5 million interested volunteers and boasts the largest community of dedicated users of any Internet computing project: 170,000 devotees on 320,000 computers.
Yet, new and more sensitive receivers on the world's largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and better frequency coverage are generating 500 times more data for the project than before. The SETI@home software has been upgraded to deal with this new data as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) enters a new era and offers a new opportunity for those who want to help find other civilizations in the universe.
"The next generation SETI@home is 500 times more powerful then anything anyone has done before," says project chief scientist Dan Werthimer. "That means we are 500 times more likely to find ET than with the original SETI@home."
According to project scientist Eric Korpela, the new data amounts to 300 gigabytes per day, or 100 terabytes (100,000 gigabytes) per year, about the amount of data stored in the U.S. Library of Congress. "That's why we need all the volunteers," he says. "Everyone has a chance to be part of the largest public participation science project in history."
The 1,000-foot diameter Arecibo dish, which fills a valley in Puerto Rico, is part of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center operated by Cornell University with funds from the National Science Foundation. Since 1992, Werthimer and his team have piggybacked on radio astronomy observations at Arecibo to record signals from space and analyze them for patterns that could indicate they were transmitted by an intelligent civilization.
When the team's incoming data overwhelmed its ability to analyze it, the scientists conceived a distributed computing project to harness many computers into one big supercomputer to do the analysis. Since SETI@home was launched, other distributed computing projects have arisen, from folding@home to predict the three-dimensional tangle of a protein to the newly-launched cosmology@home to model possible universes. Most are now on a platform called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), which was developed by SETI@home's director David Anderson so that the various projects could share resources.
"There are now 42 projects on BOINC, and, until now, there has been enough computing power to go around," Werthimer says.
What triggered the new flow of data was the addition of seven new receivers at Arecibo, which now allow the telescope to record radio signals from seven regions of the sky simultaneously instead of just one. With greater sensitivity and the ability to detect the polarization of the radio signals, plus 40 times more frequency coverage, Arecibo is set to survey the sky for new radio sources.
Computing Change: Researcher Traces History of the Personal Computer
Carbon paper? Punch cards? What are those?
The Internet, personal computers, word processing and spreadsheets are so embedded in today’s society that it’s hard to remember that just 35 years ago they didn’t exist.
Thomas Haigh, assistant professor of information studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), is among a very small number of computer experts in the world who are also historians, studying the role of technology in broader social change. These new experts are tracing how computers have changed business and society.
Researching late 20th century technology has given Haigh the opportunity to talk to many pioneers who developed both computers and the software that powers them. He conducted a series of oral history interviews for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and has written about the history of word processing and the development of databases.
One constant Haigh has found in the “froth of change” in technology is that businesses and employees are constantly trying to figure out how to make the new gadgets and processes work for them.
“There’s this feeling that anything more than five years old is irrelevant, but one of the things I’ve found is that people are facing the same types of problems now as they did in the mid-1950s – projects using new technology are usually late and filled with bugs, the return on investment is hard to measure and computer specialists are expensive and speak an alien language.”
Specializing in the history of computers Haigh is one of a growing number of historians tackling the story of 20th century computer technology.
“We’re a small, chummy group,” he says. His special interest group on computers, information and society within the Society for the History of Technology has only 150 members, and that includes graduate students, interested non-academics and computer history teachers as well as researchers.
After earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science, a Fulbright fellowship brought the British Haigh to America, where he earned his doctorate in the history and sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania.
While most computer histories focus on the hardware – Univac and inventors tinkering in garages – Haigh also looks at the software – from word processing to spreadsheets to databases – that has changed the modern world.
Among other research projects, Haigh is currently working on a social history of the personal computer.
“Despite the shelves of books on the history of the personal computer there has been no serious historical study of how people used their computers or why they bought them.”
The first computer books quickly followed the development of the programmable computers in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
“The authors of these pieces wasted few superlatives in celebrating the unprecedented speed and power of these machines,” Haigh writes in an article for the Business History Review published by the Harvard Business School. “Indeed, the earliest and most influential of the books was entitled ‘Giant Brains, or Machines That Think,’ a title that more sober computer experts spend decades trying to dispel from the public imagination.”
Those science fiction-like promises didn’t accurately reflect the reality, leading to inevitable disappointment, Haigh adds. “People would ask why they spent three years building it and writing computer code and it still made mistakes.”
Haigh’s research has shown that while new computer technology has been sometimes oversold as a complete solution for all business programs, it has also often been brushed aside as too newfangled or expensive for practical use.
“Firms tried to build enormous computer systems, into which they would place information on every aspect of their operations, and from which would flow exactly the information (including models and simulations) required by each manager,” he writes in the Business History Review.
At the same time, managers were often reluctant to invest in new technology. Charles Bachman, creator of IDS, the first data base management system and winner of the ACM Turing award, the top prize in computer science, told Haigh one such story in an oral history interview.
Bachman comments on an early data management project that a department manager discontinued. “Maybe, (it was) because he thought it was too risky and was going to cost him too much money.”
In the 1960s and 1970s, says Haigh, people viewed computers as just another business machine, like an adding machine. Computers also were seen as big central processors and nobody really foresaw today’s iPods and MP3 players.
Haigh says he studies the history of technology and computers for the same reason any historian researches the past. “It’s a platitude, but if we don’t understand who we are and where we’re coming from, how can we understand where we’re going. That’s true of religion, culture, Iraq and it’s equally true of science and technology.”
Researchers say they have created a memory device the size of a white blood cell in an advance of nanotechnology that should help manufacturer's keep up the pace of Moore's Law.
The tiny ultra-dense memory device has enough capacity to store the Declaration of Independence and still have room to spare, they say. It is called a major advance over current silicon computing technology.
The cell-sized device was created by arranging 160,000 memory bits like a large tic-tac-toe board: 400 silicon wires crossed by 400 titanium wires, each 16 nanometers wide, with a layer of dumbbell-shaped molecular switches sandwiched between the crossing wires. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter and is a common measurement in nanotechnology, which is engineering at the atomic scale.
"This research is one of the only examples of building large molecular memory in a chip at an extremely high density, testing it, and working in an architecture that is practical, where it is obvious how information can be written and read," Stoddart says.
Moore's law has long been a basic tenet of computing technology that says the complexity of an integrated circuit, or computer chip, will double every year based on increased miniaturization. Manufacturers, however, see no way to extend the miniaturization beyond the year 2013. Nanotechnology, such as the cell-sized memory device, respresents one potential solution.
"Our goal was not to demonstrate a robust technology; the memory circuit we have reported on is hardly that," says James Heath of the California Institute of Technology and a collaborator on the project. "Instead, our goal was to demonstrate that large-scale, working electronic circuits could be constructed at a density that is well-beyond (10-15 years) where many of the most optimistic projections say is possible."
