Review of 2010 (1984) by Philip M — 06 Dec 2007

OK this is 'nothing' to do with Kubrick's 2001. Each book is very separate, based around the premise of what would happen to humanity if it were contacted by superior alien intelligence.

Made at the height of the cold war with graphics supplied by the wonder of a CRAY supercompter [done by the same company that did Tron and The Last Starfighter] but actually no more powerfull then a handheld gaming console.

It is a great sci-fi film about the hope that humanity may one day be responsible and stop nailing each other to trees.

Ah well!

In the mean time watch the film and ponder;.

Will I dream?

All intelligent creatures dream, nobody knows why.

Historical note:

In 1984, the Cray-1A was replaced by a dual processor Cray XMP-22. This had two CPUs and 16 Mbytes of memory. ECMWF used this system to pioneer the operational use of multitasking, i.e. a programming paradigm that makes use of more than one CPU by a single program. The XMP system also incorporated a number of additonal improvements - an IOS (Input-Output Subsystem), which allowed the disks to be handled more efficiently and an SSD (Solid State Disk), which provided facilities for temporary I/O at speeds substantially faster than using disk.