I don't remember just when we bought the home computer I'm presently working
at, but it's something like two and a half years ago. At that time it was state
of the art - a Pentium 4 processor, 128MB of RAM, 40GB on the hard drive. I
suppose that back then I even entertained thoughts similar to those expressed
by my brother about sixteen years ago when he brought me my first computer from
the States. It was then, upon delivering that Macintosh SE with 4MB RAM and
a 20MB hard drive, that he told me something along the lines of "I doubt
you'll ever fill up this drive".
I'm not sure that I ran out of space on that hard drive (it
crashed and was replaced by a 40MB drive). But even if I didn't, space, and
of course speed, have been recurring concerns with each
computer I've owned since then. Today, what once seemed to me to be unlimited
RAM is simply insufficient. I often find myself shutting down one program before
opening another, and it's hard to find space on some of the partitions of my
hard drive for new materials - more time than is desirable gets devoted to moving
rarely visited files to unused spots on the drive in order to make room for
files I'm working on. If the boys want to install a new game, we often have
to check if an old, and no longer used one, can
be removed. Storage space on our computer simply doesn't seem to be as available
as it should be.
This situation isn't specific to computers. A few years
ago we purchased a new refrigerator. Until then, both our family size, and the
eating habits of kibbutznikim, made our refrigerating needs rather limited,
and we survived with a rather tiny refrigerator. It was clear, however, that
those days were well behind us, and we bought a new model - what looked to us
then to be immense, but was actually only mid-size. We were sure that we wouldn't
need anything bigger than that, but of course today it seems to always be full
and we need more space. There's probably some sort of universal
law connected to this phenomenon.
Just how is it that someone whose professional work is predominantly
devoted to words succeeds in filling up a 40GB hard drive? Even in Word, a program
well known for consuming vast quantities of memory, a five or six page article
doesn't take up more than 50 or 60K. That means than even someone like me, who
keeps four or five drafts of an article on the drive (even well
after the final version is finished) should still have immense amounts of
space left. But space is there to be filled up, and perhaps a
hard drive simply abhors a vacuum. For my part, at least, I do a good job
of filling it up. There are, of course, a few Giga of music files, and perhaps
a Giga of photos, and those already referred to numerous memory-intensive games
that the boys haven't played in ages that still take up a great deal of space.
In addition, I only rarely clean up the temporary files folders that seem to
grow at geometric rates, and I haven't yet mentioned my mail which I seem to
have an aversion toward throwing out. There are at least a few hundred MB of
mail on my main drive which not only takes up space, but also, even more than
the games, slows things down.
These musings (or complaints) aren't, of course, an
exact formulation of Moore's Law. And to tell the truth, whether or not
the amount of transistors on a chip doubles within a particular period of time
doesn't really concern me. What does is the culturally accepted rendition of
the law which suggests that computing power (and hard disk size) are constantly
increasing, while their price seems to constantly be declining. It seems as
though an unavoidable corollary to this law is that as soon as we get the added
speed and storage space, which we hardly thought we'd ever need, we almost immediately
discover that it's still not enough.
More space, and/or more computing power, certainly can't hurt. As I've already
admitted, as things presently stand, I'm constantly keeping an eye on how many
programs I've got running. If I want to use the scanner (which means, of course,
that I'll also be using a graphics program) I'll shut down my word processor,
and my web browser. More than four or five documents open at a time in my word
processor or in my HTML editor can mean trouble. I've had too much experience
with my computer freezing on me (inevitably before clicking on SAVE)
and having to reboot. If a bit more computing power can help me avoid such a
situation, I certainly won't complain.
But do I really need more power? With the end of this column swiftly
approaching, experienced readers of the Boidem can probably already expect that
such a question was on the way, along with a somewhat hedged "no"
as an answer. But the truth is, yes, I really do need it. Partially it's simply
an issue of pushing the envelope, of wanting to be able to do more than I can,
of being able to leave five memory-intensive programs open at the same time
and not have to worry about a crash. With only a few pangs of self-conscious
embarrassment I'll admit that yes, there's an emotional
aspect to the desire for more. I like to think that I grew out of it quite
a few computers ago, but I'll still read the adds for new (and cheaper) machines
that show up in the papers and, while my drool slowly drips onto the page, I'll
think thoughts along the lines of "if only I could double my RAM and get
an additional hard drive, I'd be happy". Although I'll admit that the impetus
for this urge toward having all the new bells and whistles resides in more than
just a miniscule element of status seeking, I
still think that my desire to increase my memory and storage space stems primarily
from legitimate computing needs. On the other hand, if Moore's law didn't exist,
I'd be in no rush to have it created, and I'd quietly, perhaps even happily,
make do with what I've got.
Return to Communications & Computers In Education - Main Page