A nearly universal hope surrounds human innovation. We have confidence that new things point toward improvement and the advancement of mankind. It's certainly not an empty hope; it evidences the deep care that exists in us. Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish historian and widely read sage of the nineteenth century, is a good example of this outlook when he spoke from the vantage point of looking back four hundred years to Gutenberg's invention of mechanical printing. "He who first shortened the labour of Copyists by device of Moveable Types," Carlyle said, "was disbanding hired Armies, and cashiering most Kings and Senates, and creating a whole new Democratic world." Sartor Resartus, book 1, chap. 5.
A century and a half later, I wonder what Carlyle might say if he could see the machine on which I'm writing this piece? This computer can check spelling and question points of grammar, along with a whole lot of other things. With this same machine I can then electronically send the manuscript to my office some twenty miles away—although the words could just as easily be sent across the continent.
Yet in comparison with what present-day computer researchers are doing and looking forward to doing, the personal computer that I'm working on is like a "tin lizzie" compared to a modern space shuttle. Another way to suggest the magnitude and complexity of modern machines is to cite technical data such as this: In 1959—the Dark Ages of computer development—a computer chip could contain one transistor. Today a single chip may have more than a million transistors, and in the next decade a chip may have more than a billion components.
