Other If you could give one part of computing a large generation jump foward, which bit?

GG with stealing their HDD.. What you havent thought of, is that a normal SATA plug wont fit, you will have no way to power it, and once you get it connected and get it started in a rig.. It wont work.. Since you need a 256 bit system to handle it. And the OS wont work w/o 8 trillion GB ram.

 

light based!!!

i want some ray tracing action, but i'd take a tube, the ones where you are like suspended in a liquid, with your mind hooked up to a supercomputer, and then i can be immersed in the Tech

 

It's hard to say but I thing I'd choose the human interface device

 

And then you'd be able to play pacman, since no computer would be powerful enough to compute all the inputs required..

 

The cooling systems.
It is supposed to be the greatest remaining problem in the future.
Think of all the crazy materials and methods they would have developed.

All other hardware is nice, but go ahead and try to use only 20 year old hardware. Nothing is at all compatible with todays systems anymore.

Now reverse it and try to use hardware on a system that is 50 years behind in development.
Won't work.

I think we won't have such huge cases as we have right now. Probably more like current mini-itx cases, but much lower power usage and a factor 30 processing power.

Storage would be really nice, but we probably couldn't read or process the software on it, so all we could do is take it apart and research the used technology.
It would be like that arm from Terminator 2.

Edit: Picarro was ahead of me in time.

 

It is because I can read your mind.

Grab the foil hats!

 

But I like this one better.

Anyway, most hardware won't be compatible, but you could sell it for a hell of alot of money.
If the systems will get as small as I think they will be, why not take the entire system.
Wait, now I am cheating aren't I.

 

room temperature superconductivity. Thats what i would bring back as it would have a huge influence on everything.

 

Right, now we are getting somewhere.

Good call.

 

I would agree with John on this one, bandwidth would be such a treat to ba able to bring back.

But sticking to the list, I would go with the input devices. All the others just seem to be hampered in one way or another.

And also for clarity, I believe this is more of a " dream " situation where any of the hardware\software brought back from the future would magically work with whatever hardware or software it was being used with in the present. Maybe using a form of Arctic Silver Pixie Dust 5

 

The ability to 'plug in' GITS style.

I've been waiting for that **** for as long as I can remember.

 

Just grab the whole lot and put it in your shirt pocket.

john

 

It would be cool with input devices.. But since we haven't invented USB 18.0 yet.. We can't connect it to anything..

 

If you had a computer with almost infinate processing power but asked it an almost infinatly difficult math question, I wounder what would happen?

Edit: Still not sure which bit Id grab but Im leaning towards the human interface / CPU.

 

I want all the pr0n on the internet in on one disk, neatly organised.

Now is that too much to ask?

 

I'm not sure I like that idea. What about the Bit-Tech forum user on user pr0n? It's a niche thing I know, but it theoretically exists now 'cos it's in your mind.

 

I would be more shocked if it didn't exist, to be quite honest.

Surely some people on here have accidentally with each other on camera?

 

I thought you already had most of it on your hard drive anyway?

 

This.
By bringing back the storage we get the software improvements and we can release the bottleneck imposed by current technology. Thus storage gives all round improvements

 

I would have to go with the storage+software route, but how would you be able to recover the data?

On the other hand, I'm very surprised that nobody has gone "Back to the Future" on this thread yet. I'd take a book with sports stats and lottery numbers.