Quotes About Computing

Qualcomm contributed key ideas about how to transmit more data via the radio spectrum and sold specialized chips with the computing power capable of deciphering this cacophony of signals. The company's patents are so fundamental it's impossible to make a cell phone without them.

In the age of AI, it's often said that data is the new oil. Yet the real limitation we face isn't the availability of data but of processing power.

dynamic (due to the repeated charging) random access memory, or DRAM.

the world produced more chips in 2021 than ever before—over 1.1 trillion semiconductor devices, according to research firm IC Insights. This was a 13 percent increase compared to 2020. The semiconductor shortage is mostly a story of demand growth rather than supply issues. It's driven by new PCs, 5G phones, AI-enabled data centers—and, ultimately, our insatiable demand for computing power.

paving the way for computer programs to automate chip design.

We rarely think about chips, yet they've created the modern world.

there's now a new instruction set architecture called RISC-V that is open-sourced, so it's available to anyone without a fee.

This was a leap forward in computing—or it would have been, if not for the moths. Because vacuum tubes glowed like lightbulbs, they attracted insects, requiring regular "debugging" by their engineers. Also like lightbulbs, vacuum tubes often burned

However, the connections between vacuum tubes could be reorganized, enabling the computer to run different calculations.

Intel's first problem was artificial intelligence.

In the chip industry, by lowering startup costs, Chang's foundry model gave birth to dozens of new "authors"—fabless chip design firms—that transformed the tech sector by putting computing power in all sorts of devices.

By the end of the 1980s, a chip with a million transistors—unthinkable in the early 1970s, when Lynn Conway had arrived in Silicon Valley—had become a reality, when Intel announced its 486 microprocessor, a small piece of silicon packed with 1.2 million microscopic switches.

It is not a large exaggeration to say that everything else in a computer exists in order to bring information swiftly to the ALU for manipulation; and for the ALU, adding is the mechanical equivalent of breathing. But

If you have an unusual ability to spot, recruit, and direct those who work well with computers, even if you don't work well with computers yourself, the contemporary world will make you rich.

At the other extreme, and far less threatening, will be the "house computer" of 2081. It will store all the information from all the books, musical recordings, and reminder notes that are now to be found in a well stocked home, and in addition, will filter the deluge of spoken, musical, and video information that will arrive every day at a typical home in that year, selecting and storing for later recall the information of interest to its owners.

while a system that is swapping is writing entire processes from memory to disk.

processor performance doubles roughly every eighteen months, but memory performance doubles roughly every seven years.

Every LWP has a kernel thread, but every kernel thread need not have an LWP:

C:COFFEE.POT missing (A)bort (R)etry (S)leep?

Computers have lots of memory but no imagination.

Back up my hard drive? How do I put it in reverse?

Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer (not advised) are called hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are called software.

RAM disk is not an installation procedure.

the word algorithm was derived from al Khwarizm