Computer software has made Joyce and Larry L. and their family rich enough to build their dream house - an enormous computer-controlled mansion complete with swimming pool, baseball pitch, miniature estate cars for racing round the grounds, and tennis court, in a leafy Dallas suburb.
There are so many rooms in the house itself that to send messages to family members they need intercoms, absolutely essential in a house where it could take half an hour to find somebody.
It is morning in the kitchen. Sitting in line at the huge breakfast bar in order of age from two to eleven are their seven children. The daily printout from the master computer in the attic with its five gigabytes of memory has already told them what the day holds for them by producing a list of activities for each member of the family. The computer has also recorded the outside temperature, the air pressure, the wind direction and speed. Inside the house it controls the lights, the room temperatures, each child's computer , the back-up generator, the tv sets and the massive security system which protects the property. .
In addition to the main computer, each child has his or her own computer station, complete with laser printer, just like Larry's.
It takes an army of helpers, dozens of machines and clockwork precision to make it all work. But then precision is something the family knows all about, for this is a house that computers have designed. Larry is the founder of a company which has built up its business providing computer software for small firms. Larry talks as he takes us on a four-hour tour of the mansion.
"I've always been fascinated by computers. In fact, i was brought up with them- worked with them since the age of fourteen! I've been lucky, though, because I've always had good people to work for me. But I think my real strength is that I've done every single job in the company myself, so I know just what's involved in each one.
The floppy disk has a capacity of 1.44 megabytes and costs about thirty cents per disk. ... These have a larger capacity than the floppy, with the zip disk capable of storing 100 or 250 megabytes of data, and the superdisk containing a 250-megabyte capacity. ... Both the CD-R and the CD-RW prove extremely useful in writing large files, since they have a large capacity of 680 megabytes. ...
Unlike the old 8- floppies of the 1970's, the 3 ½- floppy can hold 1.4 megabytes of information in formatted mode and 2 megabytes of information in its unformatted mode. ... This is because with the recordable disks you can have up to 700 megabytes of space! This is a very large amount when compared to the floppy disk's absolute maximum of 2 megabytes. ... It has gone from being an 8- plastic disk that can only hold a maximum of 200K to a 3 ½- disk that can hold a maximum of 2 megabytes. ...
The memory on a 1995 PC would be about four Megabytes, on the other hand, on a 2012 PC the memory is around eight Megabytes. ... On the 1995 PC the Hard drive was 400 to about 500 megabytes. Then you have your 2012 PC's hard drive is around 1 Gigabyte, which is equal to 1,000 megabytes. ...
Intelligent RAMNowadays, microprocessors and memories are made on different manufacturing lines. These lines are flexible 10 megabyte transistor microprocessors and 256 megabyte transistor DRAMs. Plants that manufacture these chips cost billions of dollars. One of the biggest challenges in computers...
CBC news says that little more than a megabyte is simply not enough in today's digital life. According to Richard Shim, the miniature blu-ray disk prototype, developed by Phillips, is a 1.18 inch disk that can store approximately one gigabyte [1024 megabyte] of data. ... Marketing managers, web engineers and graphic designers simply cannot store their multi megabyte work on one or two floppies anymore. ...
Not long ago, four megabytes of RAM was all it took to keep PCs running at their maximum capacity. In fact, the earliest PCs ran with just a few kilobytes of RAM. Increasingly complex software has pushed the minimum amount of RAM higher, but another, more practical reason that high amounts of RAM a...
Recommendation for Further Education College. An FE college is going to have many computers and simultaneous users, most likely over 100 unique users at any one time. This means that there will be a lot of information needed to be transferred to and from the internet. This makes me believe that...
Putting squeeze on Web video While people are trying to crack down on users swapping songs, a new fad is downloading movies. Like MP3's videos are compressed for fast downloading time. They still remain high quality when played back on a monitor. Some new technologies, called progressive downlo...
Process Of Building A PC Computer The assembly of a computer can be a simple process if you have the correct knowledge. Thought the technology has moved forward in a very rapid pace, it has remained relatively simple in it's assembly. Working a computer step by step can be very fast and easy if ...
