Over the years, a great many hardware designs have been developed requiring thousands of man-years of software development to get practical use from them. All this work had its tragic side, since as new hardware appeared, it became out of date, forcing the cycle to begin again. This soul destroying process has caused skilled people to give up development work because of being unable to keep pace, or through simply being frustrated and disheartened by the dumping of some excellent work. What if it were possible to build a system in such a way that this work could be brought back giving the chance to read old records, run early programs and still have the benefits of the optical network? This idea of being able to continually update the network without losing access to large amounts of ancient data, or being able to pass that data into modern applications and build an all encompasing system that gets wiser as it grows dates back to Multivac, a concept that appeared in science fiction stories by Isaac Asimov as early as 1956.
Why do all this? So that old software does not have to be rewritten. Old data formats don't have to be re-designed. The network gains the ability to access and process practically anything, even when old programs were hardware specific.
COPYRIGHT STATEMENT: This concept was originated by John Spencer Durham in June 2000, and posted on the internet in July 24 2000. Anyone with the means and desire to develop this principle into a commercial system is free to do so providing the originator is acknowleged by name along with the product, its packaging and manuals.PREVIOUS..............................BIOS
