Professor Geek

What would it be like to have microprocessors that don’t use transistors? It would mean instant boot, no startup time, all kinds of other benefits. The full article about this can be found at Wired News, but it’s a neat idea and apparently very possible. I used a figure in a presentation I gave yesterday at the ELearn 2006 Conference in Savannah, Georgia. It goes like this: In 2020, 70% of the jobs that will be available do not exist today because they will be based on technologies, 80% of which do not exist today.

This latest development is just another piece of evidence that those figures are likely pretty close to correct. Can you imagine what a complete rework of computer processing would mean? It would be equivalent to the transistor replacing the vacuum tube. From an engineering viewpoint, it would make nanotechnology much closer to reality and would truly make computing ubiquitous.

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