Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Time:
Timescape:
One High-Tech Second
- from Forbes ASAP, November 30, 1998
- "Keen instruments, strung to a vast precision, bind town
to town and dream to ticking dream."
Hart
Crane
Every moment may be a window on all time, as Thomas Wolfe wrote, but in
high technology the opposite is also true. Within a single second lies an entire universe
in cyberspace. Take that second and pull out one thousandth of its span, then repeat that
process again and again and again ... and you will still find a world jammed with digital
events: events that occur a million, a billion, even a trillion times -- the equivalent of
every word spoken or written by humanity in the last half-million years -- and all of it
in the span of a single breath.
This is not only awesome but transformative. We are becoming increasingly haunted
by the span of time in the micro-electronic world. Nothing in the daily experience of
living things has ever had such time "density."
Study the timescape of technical time, the growing list of events occurring in
tiny corners of a single second, and you begin to see not only a chronology but a
cosmology. High technology is rapidly becoming a universe in itself -- one in which we are
the aliens.
Philosophers debate the viability of a universe existing within a single grain of
sand. With the advancement of technology, we have turned this debate into one not of space
but of time...
(the following are decimal fractions representing parts of second -- from tenths to
trillionths!)
0.200 Zuse Z2 calculator (1938), performs addition computations
0.0167 a floppy-disk rotation
0.0333 duration of a television picture
0.0417 duration of a frame in a motion picture
0.00240 Beta-E type video moves an inch
0.00667 8 mm video moves an inch
0.000104 one bit of a fax transmission
0.000219 the exhaust of a rocket during takeoff moves one foot
0.0000100 analog TV broadcasts one bit
0.0000179 one bit is transmitted over a 56K modem
0.0000347 one bit is transmitted over a 28.8K modem
0.0000543 the first minicomputer performs multiplication computations
0.00000133 8088 microprocessor can compute an instruction
0.00000260 standard HDSL connection transfers one bit
0.000000100 an Ethernet connection transmits one bit
0.000000189 the 386 microprocessor can compute an instruction
0.0000000100 the first Pentium version computes an instruction
0.0000000734 EIDE transfer time of one byte for peripherals
0.00000000161 ATM bandwidth networks transmit one bit
0.000000000526 silicon bipolar transistors pass 30 watts
0.0000000000125 PC-1 fiber-optic system, one bit across the Pacific
Ocean
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