4 ms·

… but modern phones, watches and TVs are computers …

Retric 9y ago
Terminals are also 'computers' in that they have RAM and a CPU etc, but they where not independently useful. A tablet without google, Netflix, Facebook, Pandora, etc is just far less useful to people.
- CrystalGamma 9y ago
  Teletypes, which might have been what people where thinking of in the 60s and early 70s, didn't have a CPU AFAIK.
  - Retric 9y ago
    IBM 2260 video display terminal dates back to 1964 and is rather different from a Teletype though it also does not really have a CPU. The IBM 3270 on the other hand does significantly more processing on the device and dates to 1972 which would have made it well known in the late 70's computing world.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      I think what most people envision when talking about a terminal is the lowly VT100.
      - Retric 9y ago
        Which has an 8080 CPU... Now a 2MHz 8 bit CPU chip may not seem very powerful. But, people wrote very useful software using far less.
- camus2 9y ago
  > A tablet without google, Netflix, Facebook, Pandora, etc is just far less useful to people. What you say makes no sense. Tablets are independent computers. You don't have to be connected to the internet to make the most of it. You rely on these internet services only if you choose to. I can read a book, listen to music or watch a video without Pandora, Netflix and Co. A tablet is not a dumb terminal.
  - Retric 9y ago
    Starting from scratch you load a book, music, or video onto an iPad by connecting them to another computer. In that context your just cashing information from another system. Unless your talking about taking photos / video from it, but that's another story as a cassette deck can also record and play back audio without being a computer. Granted, you can play games with one or write notes etc, but I just mean they are mostly used as connected devices.
    - camus2 9y ago
      > Starting from scratch you load a book, music, or video onto an iPad by connecting them to another computer. In that context your just cashing information from another system. And that's true for any desktop or laptop as well. It doesn't make them dumb terminals either.
      - Retric 9y ago
        You can still buy CDs / DVDs and load them on a PC. It's possible you could jury-rig something up for a tablet, but it's also clear the intended use is as a networked device.
        camus2 9y ago
        > You can still buy CDs / DVDs and load them on a PC. Because phones and tablets don't have SD slots? or data transfer from blue tooth or NAS drives isn't a thing?
        Retric 9y ago
        Gamestop does not sell games on SD cards for those tablets. So, somewhere between 99.99% and 100% of the time that's not what happens. PS: iPhones and iPads don't have SD slots so for millions of these devices that do qualify as phones and tables it's really not an option.
    - mtone 9y ago
- simonh 9y ago
  For some tasks they are less useful, but there are still a ton of things our smartphones and tablets do that rely on local computing power. Biometric authentication such as face and fingerprint recognition is a heavily compute intensive application. It needs to be done locally in order to be secure. Face ID is just nuts. Modern smartphone photography is heavily compute-intensive, from HDR to optical zoom to image editing and markup. Just look at what Apple is doing with portrait mode and lighting effects. I love using time-lapse and slow-motion video modes. What would instagram and snapchat be without locally applied filters? Note taking, address book and time management. The notes apps on modern mobile devices are multi-media wonders with integrated text, image and handwriting recognition built-in. Calendar management, alarms and notifications all rely on local processing even if they do make use of cloud services. Without local smarts those services would lose a huge chunk of their utility. Document and media management. I read eBooks and listen to podcasts. My ebook reader has dynamic font selection, text size adjustment and will even read my books to me. Managing media on the device is essential as contemporary networks are still nowhere near good enough to stream everything all the time. My podcast app has sound modulation and processing options built in to tailor the sound to my tastes and needs, including speed up, voice level adjustment and dead-air 'vocal pause' elimination in real-time, all on-device and adjustable at my fingertips. That's serious sound studio level stuff in my pocket. Playing digital video files. Even ones downloaded or streamed. So what if we've had it since the 90s. It's still proper computation, especially with advanced modern codecs. VOIP and video calling even between continents have also become everyday and absolutely rely on powerful local number crunching. These things have become so everyday that we hardly notice most of them, but without serious on-device processing power, some of which would have been beyond $10k workstations just 15 years ago, none of this would be possible.
  - Retric 9y ago
    10's of Gigaflops is now cheap and in your pocket. But, unlocking your phone is not a use case that's just a hoop you jump through before making a phone call etc. The phone might happen to have an on board address book and calendar, but this was not a statement about access to computation. It's a statement about cost/benefit and use cases.
- wongarsu 9y ago
  Tell that to the people who sit in public transport playing games on their smartphone. A lot of the tasks usually done are impossible without internet connection, but that can be said about almost any computer. That doesn't make them useless, it just restricts them to a (still very useful and big) subset of functionality.
  - Retric 9y ago
    Starting with a new iPad, load a game without connecting to another computer. Yes, they do processing without connection to an external system. But, unlike say a play station you can't just go to a store and buy a game without connecting your device to another system.
    - cesarb 9y ago
      That might be possible on an Android tablet, though I haven't tested. Skip initial Google account setup, enable sideloading in the settings, plug a SD card (or an USB drive, if that's supported), use the built-in file manager to open the APK.
    - wongarsu 9y ago
      The disk with your playstation game is pressed as a copy of a master disk that was created by a computer. In contrast, an iPad is connected via radio waves to a transmitter that is connected via cables to computers. The only difference is the transport medium used for the computer-computer connection. At least on Android Tablets there's also nothing really stopping me from buying a USB-stick with games and installing them, without any computers involved after the stick's creation (I would have to get a friend to create it and sell it to me, but the lack of market demand, and thus supply, is besides the point).
      - Retric 9y ago
        If every other computer in the world was off you could still load and play a game on a PlayStation. That's a difference in kind. The reality is there are tablets are a third option between a standalone computer which could be programmed by hand and an dumb terminal.
- gasbag 9y ago
  Less useful to most people, sure, but most people also use their desktop computers for only those same things. I make music, and for the past several years, I've been pretty much exclusively using my phone and iPad to do it. The touchscreen works very well for my use case, and the audio pipeline is quite flexible with the right apps--in many cases outshining the workflow available on a full PC. I'm working exclusively on the device and using no external services after downloading the apps themselves. That takes far more computing power than a dumb terminal.

Terminals are also 'computers' in that they have RAM and a CPU etc, but they where not independently useful. A tablet without google, Netflix, Facebook, Pandora, etc is just far less useful to people.

CrystalGamma 9y ago
Teletypes, which might have been what people where thinking of in the 60s and early 70s, didn't have a CPU AFAIK.
- Retric 9y ago
  IBM 2260 video display terminal dates back to 1964 and is rather different from a Teletype though it also does not really have a CPU. The IBM 3270 on the other hand does significantly more processing on the device and dates to 1972 which would have made it well known in the late 70's computing world.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    I think what most people envision when talking about a terminal is the lowly VT100.
    - Retric 9y ago
      Which has an 8080 CPU... Now a 2MHz 8 bit CPU chip may not seem very powerful. But, people wrote very useful software using far less.
camus2 9y ago
> A tablet without google, Netflix, Facebook, Pandora, etc is just far less useful to people. What you say makes no sense. Tablets are independent computers. You don't have to be connected to the internet to make the most of it. You rely on these internet services only if you choose to. I can read a book, listen to music or watch a video without Pandora, Netflix and Co. A tablet is not a dumb terminal.
- Retric 9y ago
  Starting from scratch you load a book, music, or video onto an iPad by connecting them to another computer. In that context your just cashing information from another system. Unless your talking about taking photos / video from it, but that's another story as a cassette deck can also record and play back audio without being a computer. Granted, you can play games with one or write notes etc, but I just mean they are mostly used as connected devices.
  - camus2 9y ago
    > Starting from scratch you load a book, music, or video onto an iPad by connecting them to another computer. In that context your just cashing information from another system. And that's true for any desktop or laptop as well. It doesn't make them dumb terminals either.
    - Retric 9y ago
      You can still buy CDs / DVDs and load them on a PC. It's possible you could jury-rig something up for a tablet, but it's also clear the intended use is as a networked device.
      - camus2 9y ago
        > You can still buy CDs / DVDs and load them on a PC. Because phones and tablets don't have SD slots? or data transfer from blue tooth or NAS drives isn't a thing?
        Retric 9y ago
        Gamestop does not sell games on SD cards for those tablets. So, somewhere between 99.99% and 100% of the time that's not what happens. PS: iPhones and iPads don't have SD slots so for millions of these devices that do qualify as phones and tables it's really not an option.
  - mtone 9y ago
simonh 9y ago
For some tasks they are less useful, but there are still a ton of things our smartphones and tablets do that rely on local computing power. Biometric authentication such as face and fingerprint recognition is a heavily compute intensive application. It needs to be done locally in order to be secure. Face ID is just nuts. Modern smartphone photography is heavily compute-intensive, from HDR to optical zoom to image editing and markup. Just look at what Apple is doing with portrait mode and lighting effects. I love using time-lapse and slow-motion video modes. What would instagram and snapchat be without locally applied filters? Note taking, address book and time management. The notes apps on modern mobile devices are multi-media wonders with integrated text, image and handwriting recognition built-in. Calendar management, alarms and notifications all rely on local processing even if they do make use of cloud services. Without local smarts those services would lose a huge chunk of their utility. Document and media management. I read eBooks and listen to podcasts. My ebook reader has dynamic font selection, text size adjustment and will even read my books to me. Managing media on the device is essential as contemporary networks are still nowhere near good enough to stream everything all the time. My podcast app has sound modulation and processing options built in to tailor the sound to my tastes and needs, including speed up, voice level adjustment and dead-air 'vocal pause' elimination in real-time, all on-device and adjustable at my fingertips. That's serious sound studio level stuff in my pocket. Playing digital video files. Even ones downloaded or streamed. So what if we've had it since the 90s. It's still proper computation, especially with advanced modern codecs. VOIP and video calling even between continents have also become everyday and absolutely rely on powerful local number crunching. These things have become so everyday that we hardly notice most of them, but without serious on-device processing power, some of which would have been beyond $10k workstations just 15 years ago, none of this would be possible.
- Retric 9y ago
  10's of Gigaflops is now cheap and in your pocket. But, unlocking your phone is not a use case that's just a hoop you jump through before making a phone call etc. The phone might happen to have an on board address book and calendar, but this was not a statement about access to computation. It's a statement about cost/benefit and use cases.
wongarsu 9y ago
Tell that to the people who sit in public transport playing games on their smartphone. A lot of the tasks usually done are impossible without internet connection, but that can be said about almost any computer. That doesn't make them useless, it just restricts them to a (still very useful and big) subset of functionality.
- Retric 9y ago
  Starting with a new iPad, load a game without connecting to another computer. Yes, they do processing without connection to an external system. But, unlike say a play station you can't just go to a store and buy a game without connecting your device to another system.
  - cesarb 9y ago
    That might be possible on an Android tablet, though I haven't tested. Skip initial Google account setup, enable sideloading in the settings, plug a SD card (or an USB drive, if that's supported), use the built-in file manager to open the APK.
  - wongarsu 9y ago
    The disk with your playstation game is pressed as a copy of a master disk that was created by a computer. In contrast, an iPad is connected via radio waves to a transmitter that is connected via cables to computers. The only difference is the transport medium used for the computer-computer connection. At least on Android Tablets there's also nothing really stopping me from buying a USB-stick with games and installing them, without any computers involved after the stick's creation (I would have to get a friend to create it and sell it to me, but the lack of market demand, and thus supply, is besides the point).
    - Retric 9y ago
      If every other computer in the world was off you could still load and play a game on a PlayStation. That's a difference in kind. The reality is there are tablets are a third option between a standalone computer which could be programmed by hand and an dumb terminal.
gasbag 9y ago
Less useful to most people, sure, but most people also use their desktop computers for only those same things. I make music, and for the past several years, I've been pretty much exclusively using my phone and iPad to do it. The touchscreen works very well for my use case, and the audio pipeline is quite flexible with the right apps--in many cases outshining the workflow available on a full PC. I'm working exclusively on the device and using no external services after downloading the apps themselves. That takes far more computing power than a dumb terminal.