Word: processor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Japanese, though, are the past masters at making such words pay their way. Sutoraiku, for example, is the kind of strike that a pitcher throws across the plate, while sutoraiki is the kind that workers go out on. It was inevitable that the Japanese would import "word processor" and just as inevitable that they would shorten it to wa-pro. Then the younger generation seized it and made it stand for "worst proportions," meaning an unattractive woman...
...computers have grown more capacious, this design has become increasingly inefficient. While it is easy to expand memory, it is hard to increase the capacity of the processor. As a result, giant machines are forced to draw their data through a single narrow passageway known by computer scientists as the Von Neumann bottleneck...
...Connection Machine tries to do away with the bottleneck by overwhelming it with processors, 65,536 of them. Acting in concert, they can handle massive amounts of data. Equally important, each processor is assigned its own tiny memory bank. This means that processing and memory, once separated by a narrow channel, are now integrated within a fingernail-size piece of silicon. Moreover, each processor is directly or indirectly connected to every other one through what is in effect a miniature telephone system with 4,096 switching stations and 24,576 trunk lines that can be programmed and reprogrammed without actually...
These reprogrammable connections give the machine its name. For any particular task, the processors are electronically rearranged to suit the natural structure of the data. To simulate a computer component made up of 20,000 transistorized switches, for example, the machine would assign one processor to each switch. Then, rather than updating the state of those 20,000 switches one at a time, as in a traditional Von Neumann-type computer, the Connection Machine's software simply tells the 20,000 processors to update themselves all at once...
...even computer scientists find difficult to perform. According + to a DARPA report, only one in three De fense Department programmers can make the leap. Says Larry Smarr, director of the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois: "We have 40 years' experience designing software for single-processor machines. But the software for these new machines is complicated and excruciatingly hard to write...