Nothing too special about this blog, its just about my observations of the pitfalls that were made when computers were being developed. Being a little bit of a geek I just wanted to express my opinion here, if anyone knows alot about this subject then feel free to chime in.

If it were possible id love to change the Past when it comes to this stuff, but it would probably be more trouble than its worth so its just musings on my part.

I agree with some sources that the computer technology that we have right now was originally just backwards engineered from the stuff found on crashed spaceships. The movie Transformers gave a tongue in cheek reference to that with the storyline that much of earth's modern technology actually came from dissecting Megatron.

The first computers were really primitive by our standards but I think there's a possibility we've actually had access to more advanced computers than we have now from the very start. That isn't necessarily the case, but im sure that behind the curtain the technology has always been at least 10 years more advanced than what has been known on the commercial market.

I do believe that in any case, even though the technology has developed over time that the true capabilities of computers and the chips they use were suppressed. Memory chips are one of the biggest factors of how much a computer can do, and I say that the evolution of higher capacity chips was staged so that profits could be maximized, when in fact any given manufacturer could probably have mass produced Memory that had 16 times as much capacity and still sold it for the same price. Of course I don't know that, it could also be that their progress was deliberately slowed down.

One of the reasons I suspect deliberate interference is because of some of the things associated with our modern computer technology... and these are big:

* * * Many of the Adobe products, especially Shockwave Flash, are both difficult to use (you actually have to take classes with them to be good) and take up vast amounts of processing power - much more than you need to perform those kinds of processes. And somehow these products ended up being the Industry Standard even though there were a variety of other products that could do the same thing (not sure about Flash, but the development of flash-related extensions could have been suppressed too - why is it that it took this long to release HTML 5 - is it a miracle that HTML 5 ever even saw the light of day?).

* * * The SuperDisk was a 3.5" floppy drive that could also use special 120 megabyte miniature hard drives. For all the world it looked like it was going to be the next big thing, but somehow the plug got pulled on it and it faded into obscurity. Instead the ZipDrive was released, which was proprietary so you couldn't use standard 3.5" disks in it, and it had a poor record of reliability. Furthermore the ZipDrive was also usually only rated for a certain type of zipdisk, if you had a 100mb zipdisk it probably wouldn't accept a larger one. It wasn't until the invention of the USB connection and Flash Drives that large scale portable data storage (aside from CD-R) became widespread.

And like other Memory chips I think the Flash Drive capacity has also been throttled too, so they could sell 16 and 32 and 64 and 128 megabyte drives... when really they had the capability to give you 256 or 512 megabyte drives from the start without much of a price pinch.

* * * Like the SuperDisk there was also another technology in the late 90's that used Methane powered batteries for Laptops which had a much longer lifespan. It was swept under the rug so fast that I cant even remember the actual details, though I think it was rechargeable and gave Laptops an 16 hour battery life or better.

* * * The technology for DVD isn't much different from CD... it just uses smaller "pits" and a laser with a higher light frequency to read them. Considering that my father had been a electronics technician who knew the ins and outs of CD mechanisms I know for a Fact that DVD technology could have been introduced without very much delay after the CD had been released.

In which case we probably wouldn't even have CDs now because they only would have been out for 5 or 10 years before the equivalent DVD disks replaced them. Then again maybe they still would have been partnered together but im certain we would've had DVD players for our movies back in the mid 90's. As for what you would do with 6-10 times as much storage on an optical disk when it came to music... Ultra High Definition Music is another field of expertise that has been repressed.

* * * Broadband is another technology that has an eerily slow start and is still crawling along at a snail's pace. And im not even talking about wireless internet either, though that could've been introduced alot earlier as well. Cable Modems use the existing cable that comes in through the wall - even though the cable lines on the poles could've been upgraded - there are still many homes where the Cable coming in through the wall is the same cable that was there 30 years ago.

And Fiber Optic lines have been around since before I was even born. So its not like it's been for lack of ingenuity or creativity that people didn't make these connections sooner... its as if the Data Transfer Ability has been kept in check on purpose all along.

But despite whether the technology has been artificially throttled or not, even the technology that we've had available has been poorly used. The lead example id like to talk about is Graphics, since im an artist I remember frequently being limited both in terms of resolution (size of image) and the number of colors I could use. It was extremely frustrating.

And there's some evidence that this never was as big a deal as various geeks and professionals make it out to be - because in the 80's the Amiga Video Toaster was already capable of displaying 4 Billion colors... that's 32 bit video.

If I had the chance... at the very least the original graphics adapters for personal computers would've been capable of outputting video to a Television. Just like their predecessors such as the Commodore did. TVs were economical and  widely available and you wasn't limited to a 14 inch screen - you would be able to hook the computer up to a 19 inch or 27 inch tv in the family room.

For that matter a Computer Monitor is really nothing more than a TV with smaller pixels and a sharper definition ratio. The development of Monitors never did have to start with Monochrome and incorporate progressively more advanced color capacity. Televisions already had 16 Million color support from the beginning.

And when it comes to the number of Colors available by the computer, at the very least the 8 bit computer systems such as the 8088 should have been capable of handling up to 256 colors since 8 bits allows for up to 256.

But even then the designation of a system as being X Bits shouldn't have a limiting effect on what kind of data it can handle. It just means that instead of handling the data in tidy 8 bit packages (Bytes) the information can come in a stream of bits and then decoded in whatever format is necessary.

This was already done with the 16 bit color mode (which strangely had a very short lifespan before 24 bit color was introduced)... since with 16 bit color each of the color channels (RGB) consist of a number of bits that doesn't add up to 8. In fact one of the channels... usually green... has an extra bit and doesn't even equal the other two.

...Inspired by the "Yellow Pixel" that's being used on some HDTVs these days, I think there should have been a "White Pixel" from the very beginning when Computer Monitors were introduced.

And I think the concept is so important that it would be beneficial for us right now... and im hoping that somebody is going to implement it at some point in the near future since its even easier to pull off now with LED and Plasma screens.

The "White Pixel" would be one more color element to the elements that make up each Pixel on the screen. Having 4 elements also allows them to be combined into a Square shape instead of interleaving the color elements of a pixel in a hexagonal pattern (if you look really close at an old CRT monitor you can see this pattern).

So it would be Red, Green, Blue, and White. The White color element is simply what it sounds like, but it would be much Brighter than the other color elements - up to 4 times as much (bright enough to be impressive but not so bright that it hurts your eyes).

That way Saturated Brightness can be displayed on the screen, which is a problem that TVs and Monitors have never been able to solve. Instead we have to represent the Brightness of something in a movie or image by dimming the colors around it to produce contrast, which causes the overall image to lose definition.

The colors in the image look FLAT, they cannot unexpectedly pop out at you. There is no way for the image to get any brighter than simply turning on all three color channels as high as they can go (255, 255, 255 or #FFFFFF).

The only way you could achieve anything close to it is to turn up the brightness on the monitor, and have the normally occurring colors at a much lower value so that when a bright color occurs it is very bright.

This is what people have already been trying to do with HDR (high dynamic range) photography anyway but the lack of there being a way to increase the Brightness beyond the usual limitation.

There seems to be some talk in the industry of expanding the capabilities of our displays for these reasons, specifically because of the HDR crowd but also because of other effects like Backlighting and Localized Dimming.

Though it is worth recognizing that people could have abused the White Pixel effect and created images and effects that produced eye strain, the effects would have been much more satisfying when it came to multimedia projects (its not like Epileptics don't already have seizures from seeing quickly flashing lights). The same is true of other computer abuses like viruses and such, they are simply abuses.

In the early days of computing it would have also made a perfect addition to the Color Bytes in video adapters. The number 3 does not easily figure into a system that uses Base-2 (or Base-16) mechanics... but the number 4 sure does.

Even if there had been an 8 bit limit on colors with the 8 bit systems (and there probably wasnt) that still gives you 2 bits for each one... which works out to 4 shades of red, green, blue, and in this case pure brightness.

But it could just as easily been expanded to 12 bit display giving a total of 3 bits for each channel (8 shades for each color and level of enhanced brightness). Every 3 Bytes of information would cover 2 pixels worth of color data.

Or maybe it could have gone straight to 16 bit display, using 2 Bytes for each pixel, and simply truncating the second byte if there were limitations on the number of colors that could actually be displayed.

With 16 bit display, it would've been 4 bits each - 16 shades of red, green, blue, and brightness.

And finally it would have been the perfect compliment for the 16 Million color display - with each Byte representing one of the color channels (8 bits each for Red, Green, Blue, and White).

In fact it could have brought about the 16 Million color revolution much faster since 32 bit display uses an even 2 times the memory of a 16 bit display.

Whereas a 24 bit display uses 1.5 times as much memory as a 16 bit display and even though it is evenly divided into 1 Byte for each color channel those are still sets of 3 Bytes for each pixel which doesn't add up efficiently in a Base-2 system.

Regardless im sure that in the early days of computing the Graphics on computers would have looked alot nicer, would have been capable of the enhanced brightness effects... and it probably would have evolved much quicker into the graphics standard we have today.