Happy 40 Year Anniversary Information Age 2.0
INTEL -- "The microprocessor has been the engine of the digital revolution that has changed our society dramatically over the past few decades, democratizing access to information and making for a more equalitarian world. This year Intel celebrates the 40th anniversary of the microprocessor and the 40th birthday of the Intel® 4004 which was the first customer-programmable microprocessor to become available on the commercial market."
MP: After the invention of the printing press in the 15th century that started Information Age 1.0, the commercial introduction of the mircochip in 1971 was the second most important information-related breakthrough in human history. Thanks to the introduction of the microprocessor in 1971, we can celebrate this year the 40th year anniversary of Information Age 2.0.
5 Comments:
Not quite, there are two constituent blocks for information age 2.0, the PC and the internet. You can call the microprocessor the engine of the PC, but we had PCs for a decade or so before the internet really took off. And the workhorse of the internet is fiber-optic cables, made possible by a 1970 glass breakthrough at Corning, which led to deployment in the late '70s and finally widespread usage in the '90s. You might want to list both, as a box that can simply store your recipes is fairly useless, until you can connect with others to share those recipes. ;)
as luck would have it, it was also the same year I started my career in programming microprocessors in mid-1970's using Fairchild F8 and Intel 8008.
It was a blast while it lasted
"PC" is a misnomer in my mind...it was the next step from mainframes but the micro-processor revolution has spawned technologies far, far beyond a "personal" computer.
Cell phone technology, smart phones, GPS, drones, satellites, all are evolutionary outgrowths from miniaturization of the original basic mainframe computer that took up entire buildings.
the "information age" is something that is a misnomer in that when the printing press was invented - one could have called that an "information age" also...
so how does the phrase "information age" really differ from the original printing press?
is it a change in information itself or is it how information is disseminated ?
from printing press to computer screen is the "information age"?
one of the huge changes that we have seen in information itself in the last few years - is the realization that the "printed word" is not necessary fact.
vetting information is now as important as access to it.
Intel has just introduced its newest chip called Knight's Ferry, at a Seattle super computing event.
Knight's Ferry is 1 tera flop chip with more than 50 cores and matchbook-sized.
What is a tera flop? It is one trillion floating point operations per second.
From Brier Dudley at the Seattle Times:
"It wasn't that long ago that Intel was boasting about the first supercomputer with sustained 1 teraflop performance. That was in 1997, on a system with 9,298 Pentium II chips that filled 72 computing cabinets."
If only Motorola had been the CPU for PC's and not the stupid Intel with segmented memory.
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