My perfect computer:

The operating system would be invisible.
It would look like the Apple G4 Cube.
It would use something like the Apple 22” Cinema display but would only cost $400.00 per monitor.
It would support up to 3 monitors.
The connection would be digital, like the new Apple Cinema display.
It would support other screens of ever increasing dimensions as long as they have the same connector.
The connections would be something you could make at home like RG6 or CAT5 wire.
The sound output would be Dolby Digital and DTS.
The “hard drive” would be non-volatile RAM.
The “operating system” would be on an E-PROM so the boot-up is instant.
The computer wouldn’t care if it were left on 400 days a year and 8 days a week. In other words, the buffer and temp files wouldn’t clog it up and need the computer to be turned off to clear them.
The “hard drive” would be large enough for all of my music and 50 hours of stored television, like the Replay TV box.
The DVD would record.
It would contain my satellite receiver.
The keyboard would be wireless.
Although it would have a remote mouse, it would also be voice activated.
It would be able to have remote monitors and speakers much like a Bose sound system.
It would be my phone system, and voice calls would be free.
Broadband would be able to transmit proper video signals.
My digital camera, cell phone and personal sound system would be integrated into my glasses, wirelessly. And they wouldn’t weigh much.

And of course, I wouldn’t need my glasses to correct my vision.

It's amazing just how fast a top of the line computer system is outdated these days. Your kids will laugh at you for wanting a dream system "so pathetic and slow" as I'm sure they will call it.

I figure they'll be running at a GIG sometime soon!

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Look at the clock speeds found in most PCs (near top of the line) in common use each year:

1981: 4.77 MHz
1984: 6 MHz
1986: 8 Mhz
1988: 12 MHz
1989: 33 MHz
1991: 50 MHz
1992: 66 MHz
1994: 100 MHz
1996: 200 MHz
1997: 266 MHz
1998: 400 MHz
1999: 600 MHz
2000: 1000 MHz

But, on the other hand, take the topic of formal languages and automata theory. Look at the 1969 and 1979 editions of a standard textbook, such as the ones by Hopcroft and Ullman, and a lot of the material is the same. I took a class in 1995 and we used the 1979 edition. It just hasn't changed much. Look at NP-completeness. We used a 1979 book for a class on this topic in 1999! It seems the theory concerning algorithms in general, and what we can and cannot do efficiently (in polynomial time), or at all has changed very little in the past 20 or so years. In fact, some of that theory was in place in the 1930s and 1940s before modern computers were even being built.

I have a coworker that has many ideas similar to the ones in the list that started this thread (operating system being invisible and getting rid of filesystems and hiding implementation details from the user). I just don't think a lot of the things will ever happen. I am currently working on a Ph.D. in computer science (I have an M.S. degree in computer science and a B.S. in mathematics). For a lot of things to happen, I think there need to be some advances in the underlying theory of computing. Speed is nice, but I have seen many cases where improving the algorithm (if possible) can make a program run at acceptable speed even on a slow computer. Faster computers have caused software developers to get lazy, and the code they write to become larger and more "bloated", memory hungry, and disks space hungry than ever before. Until the focus is back on efficiency and better algorithms, the trend will continue.

Operating systems have changed quite a bit during the past 15 years. I've used everything from old second-generation operating systems like MVS for IBM mainframes to VMS (VAX systems) to UNIX (many platforms) to DOS, OS/2, and Windows for PCs. I tended to like UNIX the best, although you have to run Windows to be able to run the most popular software.

I have a 933 MHz Pentium III here with Wondows 2000 and it does most things I want to do really well, but this machine cannot do multiple things at once very well without killing the user interface response time. Silicon Graphics workstations running UNIX were much better at that (running background jobs without killing performance for foreground jobs). Although Winodws 2000 is great, there will always be device driver pains and functionality that you have to add by installing 3rd-party software. I just the shell in Windows 2000 were a full-featured UNIX shell. I really wish Windows 2000 had UNIX underneath supporting it. It would be a much better system if it did.

Well, I guess I've yakked enough for now.

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We have, for years, been using multiprocessor SGI servers, one of which has 8 CPUs, which is heavily used, but remains very responsive and never seems to get bogged down. (This particular machine runs IRIX, which is SGI's UNIX). I've always found it interesting that IRIX machines seem to remain responsive with a backgound task running, even if the machine has only one CPU. Single processor PCs tend to not handle background processing well at all without seriously impacting the response of the GUI.

Evans

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What does MMX actually do?

It took me months to find out. The only answers I could get was, "It speeds up graphics..."

And, the answer is...

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