13 Things About official semiconductor independence impossible You May Not Have Known
In the late 1970s, I remember a friend of mine telling me how much easier it would be to get a new computer if the US hadn’t had to put up with the idea of the Soviet Union being the major computer supplier to the world. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it certainly felt that way to me back then.
It’s not entirely true, as the Soviet Union was more than happy to sell its computers to the likes of Intel and other countries. But if you talk to enough Americans, you’ll hear that the “good old US of A” has always had plenty of competition in the computer world. And its usually not the company that makes the computer’s that are the problem.
I’ve heard, for example, that one of the first companies that made computers with chips in the 1980s were companies like RCA, so you definitely can’t be sure that the Soviet Union was the only company that had computers you could buy for $10 in the 1980s.
What a surprise. If you think about it, the computer industry was pretty much the only industry that you could buy computers for 10 in the 1980s. If you wanted a computer the size of a small laptop (which is what you think those computers were for), you could get one for about $10. If you wanted a computer that could play games, you could get one for about $100. You could get a computer that could do any of these things for about a hundred bucks.
If you look again, this was back in the early 1980s. But even back then computers were starting to become bigger and more powerful. That’s what made it possible for you to buy a new computer for your mom for $100. You could buy a computer in the 1980s for a few bucks, but it was a different world. Nowadays you can buy a computer for about $500. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s really hard to be independent.
I have to tell you, the whole idea of computer independence is not really something that most people really think about. Many people would prefer to have a computer that does exactly what they want on demand. The computer they want to drive to work will be there, powered up, and ready to use whenever they want. But its hard to buy a computer that will do exactly what they want on demand. If youre stuck at work and the computer will do exactly what you want, it will.
The problem is computers typically have to have some form of processing power. In a similar way we say our phones would be useless if they had no screen. The trouble is when a computer needs processing power, it runs slower.
So if you take the computer out of the equation, you are left with a problem. The problem is that the computer has to do all of the work while you are at work. That is a problem.
The first thing we can do is allow the computer to do a little work. A little bit of processing power is all that is required. More processing power means more computational power. For example, if you have a laptop with a 486 or a Pentium 4 chip in your desktop computer you might be able to do the same amount of work as you could on a desktop computer. More processing power means more memory, which allows you to store more data.
This is the point where you can say, “Oh but my CPU is better than the CPU in my desktop computer,” and then you’ll end up with something that is not as good as it could be.
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