Microelectronics and the Personal Computer
Microelectronics and the Personal Computer
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微电子学和个人计算机
DOI：
10.1038/scientificamerican0977-230
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发表时间：
1977
影响因子：
3
通讯作者：
Alan Kay
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Alan Kay
未来微电子设备容量的增加和成本的降低，不仅会使硬件变得更加紧凑和强大，而且会给人与计算机的交互方式带来质的变化。在20世纪80年代，成人和儿童都将能够拥有一台大笔记本大小的电脑，它几乎可以处理他们所有与信息有关的需求。计算和存储能力将是目前微型计算机的许多倍：每秒数千万次基本操作将处理相当于几千页打印信息的数据。个人电脑可以看作是人类交流媒介的最新例证。自从人类开始说话以来，各种存储、检索和操作信息的方法就已经存在了。外部媒介的作用是捕捉内在的思想进行交流，并通过反馈过程形成思想遵循的路径。虽然数字计算机最初被设计用来做算术运算，但它们模拟任何描述性模型细节的能力意味着，如果将计算机视为一种媒介，如果模拟方法描述得足够好，它可以模拟任何其他媒介。此外，与传统媒介不同的是，传统媒介是被动的，在某种意义上，在纸上的标记，在画布上的绘画和电视图像不会改变艾伦·c·凯对观众意愿的反应，计算机媒介是主动的：它可以回应询问和实验，甚至可以与用户进行双向对话。个人电脑的发展遵循了与印刷书籍相似的道路，但在40年而不是600年。就像中世纪的手工书一样，在1960年之前的20年里制造的大型电脑也是稀缺的，昂贵的，只有少数人可以使用。就像印刷术的发明导致图书馆里的书被锁在一起供社区使用一样，20世纪60年代引入的计算机分时系统将昂贵的计算机的容量进行了分区，以降低它们的访问成本，并允许社区使用。正如工业革命通过提供廉价的纸张和机械化的印刷和装订使个人书籍成为可能一样，20世纪70年代的电子革命将带来20世纪80年代的个人计算机，它具有足够的存储空间和速度来支持高级计算机语言和交互式图形显示。
The future increase in capacity and decrease in cost of microelectron ic devices will not only give rise to compact and powerful hardware but also bring qualitative changes in the way human beings and computers interact. In the 1980's both adults and children will be able to have as a personal pos session a computer about the size of a large notebook with the power to handle virtually all their information-related needs. Computing and storage capacity will be many times that of current mi crocomputers: tens of millions of basic operations per second will manipulate the equivalent of several thousand print ed pages of information. The personal computer can be regard ed as the newest example of human mediums of communication. Various means of storing, retrieving and manip ulating information have been in exis tence since human beings began to talk. External mediums serve to capture in ternal thoughts for communication and, through feedback processes, to form the paths that thinking follows. Although digital computers were originally de signed to do arithmetic operations, their ability to simulate the details of any descriptive model means that the com puter, viewed as a medium, can simu late any other medium if the methods of simulation are sufficiently well de scribed. Moreover, unlike conventional mediums, which are passive in the sense that marks on paper, paint on canvas and television images do not change in by Alan C. Kay response to the viewer's wishes, the computer medium is active: it can re spond to queries and experiments and can even engage the user in a two-way conversation.The evolution of the personal com puter has followed a path similar to that of the printed book, but in 40 years rath er than 600. Like the handmade books of the Middle Ages, the massive com puters built in the two decades before 1960 were scarce, expensive and avail able to only a few. Just as the invention of printing led to the community use of books chained in a library, the introduc tion of computer time-sharing in the 1960's partitioned the capacity of ex pensive computers in order to lower their access cost and allow community use. And just as the Industrial Revolu tion made possible the personal book by providing inexpensive paper and mech anized printing and binding, the mi croelectronic revolution of the 1970's will bring about the personal comput er of the 1980's, with sufficient storage and speed to support high-level com puter languages and interactive graphic displays.