Geezers at AMW 50

 In another blog recently, I got on a roll about "reflections" -- as in trolling through old memories.  And, honestly, old guys sometimes do this (often around grandchildren, who {truth be told} sit quietly and appear to listen, but if you could monitor their thoughts, they're of the form 'when will the old geezer shut up?').

I just attended the 50th anniversary of the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop (AMW 50), and true to form, they (and me) trotted out a series of old stories and pictures of much younger folk who had hair.  This fun went on for quite a while the first day, while thanking half the audience for 'being new with us' and 'glad to have you'.   This was one of those hybrid events that COVID foisted upon us--and presently in the Chat part of the remote viewers, a message appeared, to the effect of "when are these old geezers going to shut up??'

I'd been thoroughly enjoying the folderol, but I suddenly imaged my grandchildren, and I thought, "These designers are here to talk about what the new Nvidia chips with AI can do, and we're wheezing about what it was like to have a new 8008 from Intel with a bootstrap loader."    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8008

The Intel 8008 had a whopping 3,500 transistors, 50% more than the ground-breaking 4004 from Ted Hoff two years earlier in 1971, running in 'fast mode' at 800 KHz.   The Nvidia RTX (Real-time eXperience) 3070 chip introduced six years ago has 5,888 computer 'cores' onboard, with a clock speed of 1.73 GHz, and as one industry observer said at the time: 

"It is not an exaggeration to say that NVIDIA CUDA technology could well be the most revolutionary thing to happen in computing since the invention of the microprocessor. It's that fast, that inexpensive, and has that much potential."  Less than $500.   CUDA means (Compute Unified Device Architecture) and represents (estimate ~ 500,000 devices EACH)

So the geezers are 'out to lunch' and I had a ball showing off our new ENLIVENZ displays from AstroVirtual, where we run up to 100 Virtual 30 foot diameter screens in Real-time Pixel-streaming mode for 'next-to-nothing' in cost, and full 1080 graphics mode--like $100 per month for viewing and intercting with 100 interactive screens.  See our website https://www.astrovirtual.com/

But for us old geezers, it was fun to see AMW folk again, and reminince--we could have dwelled on the fact that old HP folk started and ran this thing for most of its life, but that'd take us down another rathole.