Now I know who to blame for spyware
Nov. 28th, 2005 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalWhen our family friend James Douglas died, my dad gave me a bunch of his papers that he couldn't find any place for and thought I might find interesting. One of them was a small pamphlet (unclassified) published in 1970 from his days as an NSA mathematician, titled "Queing Models for Time-Shared Processors".
Quote:
Time-shared systems have been developed to provide optimum utilization of a processing facility, and while doing so provide concurrent processing for many users on a real-time basis. Both considerations are clearly related and can be expressed in economic terms. Providing amicable user machines (conversational systems, real-time systems) has its economic justifications in that by making the processor more readily availible, users can develop applications with a minimum of the wait time associated with the computer processing a program, when the user would be "idle" waiting for his program to return. (fourteen pages of incomprehensible mathematics follow.)
If I'm translating this right, basically Mr. Douglas had a hand in developing what we now know as computer multi-tasking. In other words, the typical home computer's ability to run background programs like a music player or just burning a disc, while the user does something else such as surf the Net or write a Word document.
Holy cr*p.
Quote:
Time-shared systems have been developed to provide optimum utilization of a processing facility, and while doing so provide concurrent processing for many users on a real-time basis. Both considerations are clearly related and can be expressed in economic terms. Providing amicable user machines (conversational systems, real-time systems) has its economic justifications in that by making the processor more readily availible, users can develop applications with a minimum of the wait time associated with the computer processing a program, when the user would be "idle" waiting for his program to return. (fourteen pages of incomprehensible mathematics follow.)
If I'm translating this right, basically Mr. Douglas had a hand in developing what we now know as computer multi-tasking. In other words, the typical home computer's ability to run background programs like a music player or just burning a disc, while the user does something else such as surf the Net or write a Word document.
Holy cr*p.
