1st December 1996I got a bonus from where I am working just now and blew the lot on some CDs which I have wanted for some time now. The second and third Roxy Music albums (I already had the first and fourth), two by Bjork (Debut and Post) and The Beatles Anthology 3.
I'm a die hard Beatles fan and had to get the Anthologies; they aren't too bad. Roxy Music is so exciting and different and Bjork, especially Debut, is so interesting. She seems to have found something really quite new and unique.
I say all this because most of the time that I have been preparing this EUG, I have been listening to one of these CDs.
I'm afraid that no matter how hard I tried, records just seemed to end up with clicks and jumps for me. I used to record them as soon as I bought them but CDs take away that problem. I now have everything The Beatles made so I can drift back to a time when my life had different compilcations. Not always happier; I never really thought that childhood was the happiest time of life. But just drifting back to when the ultimate technology was a stereo record player with speakers attached by bits of wire or a new smaller transistor radio. Space walks, strong views and opinions on every subject, BBC 2 TV sets, old friends, making a fool of myself and that old chestnut, how do you talk to girls?
There was a report in the newspapers recently about a French team who had apparently developed a superconductor which worked a 25c.
For those who don't really understand the significance of this, let me explain. The wire connecting your table lamp to the mains is a lot thinner than the wire connecting your electric kettle. The reason is that the kettle uses about 40 times as much current. Current is if you like the substance of electricity. The cable is of course a conductor.
Now all conductors have a certain amount of resistance which restricts the amount of current that will travel along it. A thin cable like on the lamp will have less conducting surface so if you try to connect it to a kettle, the current, which is being restricted by the cable's resistance, will be turned into heat and the cable will melt. Now that is a simple but effective explanation of a conductor. A super conductor has very little resistance so it can carry huge amounts of current without ever heating up. Using super conductors you could power your whole house on a cable, perhaps as thin as a hair, depending on how good the super conductor is. That's the theory anyway.
Now it is highly unlikely that a super conductor will be used for domestic electricity supplies. But it will certainly be used in computers. Then you would have a computer where the only power consumption was from the individual components, perfect signal paths and an increase in speed and power.
Super conductors are something of an alchemist's dream though and more than one person who I have spoken to (who is connected with this area of technology) reckons it will remain just that for the foreseeable future anyway.
Now it seems that this report was a bit premature. Apparently a French scientist was casually mentioning to someone that he was going to experiment with some compounds, the conversation was overheard by a journalist who wrote the story as apparent fact.
Following on from this, there are a number of people who are claiming that they have developed computers which go a trillion cycles per second and some which can think. One chap claims to have a program running which is now writing itself. And of course someone has demanded controls before these computers take over the world.
And added to all this with the advent of the European Monetary Union, there is yet another reason to dread the comming of the next century. Keyboards don't have the symbol for the Euro!
One thing is for sure. EUG and your 8bit Acorn micro will be here for EUG #30. Send something in.
Gus Donnachaidh, EUG #29
