Spider cleared his throat. Over a hundred thousand per wall.
From ten to the third to ten to the fifth. In two dozen months. I'd call that impressive.
Lim, sensing the blow, stood up. Actually, we'll have to step up just as many more orders of magnitude before we can start to deliver believability without a lag.
I agree. Jackdaw addressed his calculator watch. Reality demands something on the order of a hundred million. Reality… is ten to the eighth surface-filled polygons a second.
Minimum, Spider agreed, and sat down. Freese nodded. You see? This is the problem. Reality is always a problem, Spiegel said.
The question is: when does the show stabilize and our act hit the road? At our current rate of change, the answer is never. The product would be forever obsolete before we got it out the door.
O'Reilly raised his hand. It sounds like you're saying that Deep Pockets is wanting to see some more near-term return?
I'm afraid they want a public press conference for the spring. By next year's SIGGRAPH convention, we're to do a grand rollout. The popular press between now and then will be whipping the public imagination into a frenzy. We'll need to show something, just to compete with the rumors.
Hardware, Software, and Design all took the floor to lodge their official reservations. But by the time the party broke up, the rules of the game had changed.
Freese saluted them as they left. March of'91, then. Delivery Day.
He wants us to be salesmen? Adie asked Ebesen, back in the cubicles. This is all just about selling iron?
The old guy hunched his flannel shoulders. You knew it had to happen someday.
No, I didn't, she said. It never occurred to me.
Know what you should make? Lim told her. He was gutting Rembrandt again, tossing the machine's outdated entrails into cardboard boxes full of priceless scrap. A RAM room. You know: a huge blow-up representation of everything happening inside the real computer down at silicon level, right as it's running the simulation.
She gave the notion three seconds. Bad idea. Am I to take it, from this mound of scrap metal, that we are obsolete again?
They say that the Great Wall was obsolete before it was halfway finished. Your average printed circuit hoard is obsolete before it's even begun.
Someone should go through all these junk piles, she said. It's getting hard to walk in here.
Lim looked up, horrified. We can't throw any of that away. We might have to… refer to it.
Why? Why? She picked up a shoebox-sized assembly, once a miracle of miniaturization, a whole interplanetary system. Now incompatible with everything. She dropped the chunk of parts. Worthless.
We can use some of those old motherboards as souped-up serial ports.
Spider, these things are all dead. Killed by bigger, faster, better. Cartons of milk past the stamped expiration date. Tickets for last night's concert.
TeraSys might be able to sell them to places that are still back at earlier machine levels.
You mean that Bulgaria might be interested in running its own experimental virtual reality program, now that it's joined the Free World?
I was thinking more like, you know, Arkansas?
She mentioned the elephants' graveyard to Jackdaw and Rajan. This world digitization thing is the single most wasteful expenditure of effort
in history.
The kid bared his palms. You think the hardware side is wasteful? At least you can make those things into doorstops and paperweights. At least you can pirate last year's million-dollar state-of-the-art research tool for its edge connectors.
Rajan chuckled. Right. Smelt them down to reclaim the two dollars and fifty cents' worth of gold plating on the pins.
But software…? Jackdaw said. Nothing is more pitiful than Version I. The biggest sinkhole of human genius in existence. The average lifetime of a given release is now shorter than the time it takes to leam its features. And as soon as Version 2 comes out, Version 1 turns into a time bomb in the operating system, just waiting to foul up any improvements in other software that postdates it.
Let us put this in your terms, Rajan said. Suppose all of world art came down to the last three months of images. Every time an artist painted a painting, it invalidated all previous paintings of the same subject.
Sure. That's called commercial design. I did that for half a dozen
years.
It's worse than that, Jackdaw cut in. Most development has no coordination to speak of. The wheel gets reinvented a million times a day, even in the same company. Even at the same workstation. It took half a century of coding to come up with reusable objects. And even now, they're not all that reusable, because, you know, the APIs and the hardware standards are changing the ground underneath them by the
nanosecond.
Rajan's cranium went into sympathetic oscillations. Truly demoralizing. Every basket of subroutines has to be invented dozens of times, each one doing the same thing in slightly different ways. Then all of these maddening, incompatible variants are thrown into public battle to determine which one will become the de facto standard, and everyone who puts money on the wrong flavor has to throw it out and start over again.
Kaladjian came and stood nearby, cleaning off his glasses. Fortunately for all of us, waste is this culture's greatest engine.
The others looked up, snagged by some expansive departure from his usual tone.
Is that supposed to be ironic? Raj asked.
Kaladjian gave a victimized shrug. Progress is destruction with a compass.
Raj's nods accelerated a couple of hertz. It does make one wonder what the finish line looks like.
Adie dear, Spiegel said. You've come to a world where truth is stamped with its own expiration date.
Jackdaw grimaced. Not to mention the obsolete media. We still have these ancient tapes from before we ported to the Cavern? They can't be read anymore. The machines that used them have all been upgraded beyond compatibility. And even when we rebuild an antique drive from scratch? The tape has decayed; it spits out check-sum errors every three records.
The world is losing its memory. Raj toyed with a stack of printouts headed for the shredder. Whole areas of the collective brain are being wiped out as its storage degrades. We've contracted a slow virus. Global Alzheimer's.
Kaladjian lifted one shoulder. His tilted ear met it halfway. Perhaps. But look how far we managed to get, from flint to silicon, before the enterprise shut down.
The Cavern caved in for several days, while Lim and company finished debugging a new generation of graphics accelerators. Deprived of their magic testing chamber, imagination's prototypers hit a wall.