Moore's Law and Time to Railroad

[starshipcat]

The author of The Intel Trinity makes an excellent argument that Moore's Law is not just descriptive, but also predictive: try to get ahead of that curve and build a "super-chip," and you're going to get burned, bad. As evidence he offers the sad example of Gene Amdahl's Trilogy Systems, which had as its flagship product a super-chip so powerful it

Comments

[whswhs]

I rather like the solar system with a semihabitable Mars and Venus, though it seems to me that it's less steampunk than early 20th century. Lowellian Mars shows up in The War of the Worlds and A Princess of Mars, which are formative works of twentieth century SF, and it lingers in the Heinlein and Asimov juveniles (for example, Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus); I've wondered if Roger Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" can be read as an elegy for the old solar system that was becoming obsolete as he wrote.

The idea of Mars as ancient and dying, and Venus as primeval, might reflect Kelvin's idea that the heat of the sun came entirely from gravitational compression, so that the sun was cooling over time (instead of heating up, as we now believe), and planets further from it cooled to habitability earlier. The idea that really ancient planets break up or explode, like Krypton or like the hypothetical planet that turned into the asteroids, might fit into that; I can imagine Superman as a survivor of the long ago wreck of the asteroids