The computer industry has experienced rapid technical growth in the past. Computer performance, in terms of operations per dollar, has improved between 1950 and 1962 at a rate of more than 80 percent per year.* During this period it has been found that the power of a computer is approximately proportional to the square of its cost; a computer costing ten times as much as another will be 100 times more powerful and will process a unit of throughput at 1/10 the cost of the cheaper machine.**

*KE Knight, compared 225 general purpose computer systems manufactured between 1944 and 1963. His findings were that computer performance, in terms of operations per dollar, had improved between 1950 and 1962 at an average rate of 81 percent per year for scientific computation and 87 percent for commercial computation? | Changes in computer performance, Datamation Vol 12 No 9 pp 40-54 1966 (via rd jones, acm national meeting 1967

– "Within the next decade electronic data centers are expected to sell computational power to the general public in a way somewhat analogous to today's distribution of electricity," | M.R. Irwin: "The computer utility", Datamation Vo112 No 11 pp 22-27 1966

– The computer utility is an emerging form of organization providing computer services to all types of users ... ... These developments suggest advantages for several users in sharing the power of a single large computer, with the computing power brought separately to each user's location, in the spirit of the folk saying, "why buy a cow when milk's so cheap?"" | R. D. Jones: "The public planning information system and the computer utility", Proceedings A.C.M. National Meetings, 1967

– ... simultaneously making available to a multitude of diverse geographically distributed users a wide range of different information-processing services and capabilities on an on-line (immediate) basis. As in any utility, the overhead would be shared among all users, with each user's charges varying with the actual time and facilities used in the solution of his problems. Ideally, such a utility would provide each user, whenever he needed it, with a private computer capability as powerful as the current technology permitted but at a small fraction of the cost of an individually owned system | D. F. Parkhill: The Challenge of the Computer Utility, 1966

forecasts are:

that 75 per cent of all computers will have a time- sharing capability by 1970 (General Electric); that by 1975 almost all computer usage will be "on-line" (Informatics [a company at the time]); and that within five years some 60 per cent of all computers will be tied into the nation's communication network (Western Union). | M.R. Irwin, 1966

lots of still bending questions have been discussed under the terms "computer utility" and "public planning informations systems" in the 1960s: data banks, privacy, regulations, business of data acquisition, ... you name it.

... These initial systems were far from optimal but can be well justified in the spirit of Chesterton's dictum that a thing worth doing at all is worth doing badly. | R. D. Jones

MIT News (09/10/10) Morgan Bettex

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab professor Tod Machover has spent more than a decade inventing the technology for a new opera premiering in September that could redefine the technological enhancement of live performance. Machover says he designed the technique of disembodied performance to complement the singers rather than overshadow them, which he sees as a problem in contemporary musical performances. Machover's opera, "Death and the Powers," features a character who is offstage most of the time, and who expresses himself through elements that include an animated set of bookcases and a chandelier that emits light and has Teflon strings that can channel the unseen character's presence when they are strummed. In addition, there are nine life-size singing robots that function as a chorus and frame the narrative. The disembodied performance is rendered through software that measures both conscious and unconscious aspects of the singer's performance, such as volume, pitch, muscle tension, and breathing patterns. | via technews

would like to hear and see