(Afraid I've been unable to reply for a while, will try to make up.)
Scott Kellogg writes:
> The problem we are dealing with is that Traveller came out in '79
> and had the '60's outlook of what technology was gonna do in the
> next 10 years. Look at all the predictions that have gone wrong:
>
> <list>
>
> The point is that back when Trav came out, we thought technology
> was gonna go alot faster than it did. (We also thought that the
> economy would keep us going at the rate we did!) Let's face it,
> technology is not progressing at the rate it did back then. Some
> of our top of the line fighter aircraft are 15-20 years old. We
> went from P-51 mustangs to Tri-sonic aircraft in that amount of
> time! GEEZ!
>
> Well, anyway, We are at the low end of TL 8, and have been for
> about 10+ years. No we don't have fusion, no we don't have
> antigrav, but take a look at the ref's manual, those aren't TL 8
> any more! When Trav first came out, they were, but then the
> plasma physicists said '20 more years folks' and MegaTrav made it
> TL 9.
I'm afraid I don't see that at all. Our outlook on technology has
changed, true. But it's been more of a shift of effort into different
areas. For instance, computer technology. Immeasurable bandwidth
has been consumed here and elsewhere about how we didn't expect the
personal computer revolution, how it left technology watchers with
their pants down and so on. If one extrapolates, I'm sure your Hewlett-
Packard Snake workstation, MIPS R4000-based machine, or the like blows
away comparable computers listed for TL8. With new display technologies
and (cross fingers) voice recognition we could build the TL11 'Computer,
Hand' with a non-holographic DDRH within 10 or 15 years. The increasing
portability of telephones, laser printers, scanners, facsimile machines
and the like make their Traveller equivalents look almost silly.
What I'm driving at is that in the past ten or fifteen years things have
changed differently than the designers of Traveller thought they would.
When Mr Miller started this, words like 'cyberpunk' and 'nanotechnology'
hadn't been coined yet, many of the innovations of the Xerox PARC and the
MIT AI Lab had not been so promulgated, and the Japanese just made cars.
A few deprived individuals reading this may be running UUCP software
at home or at work on a small computer that may run at only one to five
VAX Units of Processing Speed and less than four MBytes of memory.
But most of the readers are on boxen on the net that in all likelyhood
have at least 8 megabytes of memory. How much did that cost in 1973?
The only reliable figure I have for that time is for Honeywell Level 6
minicomputer's 16 Kword (32 Kbyte) memory board. It used 4kx1 DRAM chips,
which were (almost) new then. It cost $10,000 retail, $2000 to manufacture.
Using this figure, eight megabytes would half a million dollars just to
produce. With markup, a cool $2,500,000. This included the decoding and
refresh logic, unlike the average piece of memory sold today.
But one must admit that we've come a long way when you can go to your
local computer store and buy a $150 4 Mbyte memory module that takes less
than 1/20th the board area. Then consider the processors, the hard disk
drives (gone from a 2 Mbyte pizza-box sized platter to 2.4 GByte 5.25"
form-factor boxes), the network hardware (in 1980 the 'experts' said
Ethernet would never work), and on down the line.
We don't have the jet fighters with the capabilities foretold by the
SR-71, the XB-70, the F-14. We don't have a space station (sorry, Mir),
a lunar base. But we could build them if the public called for them.
HAL was not born this year, true. Neither was Robbie the Robot. But
there are projects that may soon produce them. (Cyc, for instance.)
Sure, we don't have fusion, weather control, grav tech. Cold fusion
(don't laugh) may yet produce answers: there are researchers at a liberal
arts college in Maryland that believe they have found a non-nuclear and
non-chemical explanation for the excess heat. And British researchers
just fired off a test which produced the first controlled fusion event.
They didn't lie; no-one's crystal ball is without a flaw. In some ways,
we're doing better than anyone had dreamed. In others, we're behind.
But we're getting there. Doomsayers have prophesied for the past ten
years that we're about to run out of improvements to silicon. They've
also said that we would run out of room to expand, not to mention blow
up the world. Now they say we've irrevocably poisoned this planet.
And progress continues.
I'd say we're TL 8 in most respects. But we are not straight TL 8 by
any means. That's not to say that _we're_ wrong. Rather, either the
scale should be redefined, or split into its component parts. Or both.
And I don't think that the fact that we don't have grav control is a
fault of ours. The game designers were just a little overly optimistic.
Be patient. We're getting there.
> Fade out grumbling...
>
> Scott Kellogg
<grin>
Jack Dietz
// [email removed]