“But What Do You Use It For?”

“But what do you use it for?  What do you do with it?”
These questions came from my mother during a recent conversation.  She was asking me about my computers and my electronic-infested life, and could not understand why I am so attached to my computers and gadgets.  My step-father had asked me not long before [...]

Ancestor of Distributed Computing of 2230?

From the history of 2230 (see the second post of this blog for full text):
The technique of distributed computation — using thousands, even millions, of computers to process massive amounts of data during unused processor cycles — enabled researchers to do in days what would have taken decades of tedious work. Such rapid numbercrunching accelerated [...]