"I want to talk to the boss," I called out.
"Whom shall I tell her is calling?"
"Good girl," Angelina said, always an enthusiast for female equality.
"Not her, him, James, his father. . ."
"Grrrk, " the computer said as it was interrupted. "Good to hear from you,
Dad. Long time no talk. "
"Too long. All work and no play. But work first. I need a supercomputer for
some research we are undertaking, one that's not as big as a house and needs
an electric cable as thick as your arm to supply the juice."
"You have just described our Nanotechtric-68X. I'll get one to you at once."
"Everlasting thanks," I said and disconnected. The doorannunciator bleeped.
"I'll get it," Angelina said, then-"James, what a pleasant surprise, come
in."
When my son says at once he really means it. "When you phoned I was in my
chopper-and I had a 68X with me. I was just a hop away."
He brought in a battered leather suitcase, set it down and then it was
kisses and handshakes all around. I eyed the suitcase suspiciously.
"Planning a trip?" I asked.
"Our latest model, the 68X." He swung it up onto the table and pressed the
latch. A screen flipped up and the keyboard popped out. I looked at it
dubiously and he laughed. "This is just about our first working model. We
breadboarded it to fit into this old suitcase. Streamlining and whizbang
decor will all come later. For field testing this can't be beat." He patted
it affectionately. "It works in a massively parallel mode. It uses
distributive resources that reach out to memory spread across high-speed
networks, which makes its speed not only unmeasurable-but even hard to just
estimate. Its high-end massively parallel systems are really in the several
teraflop range."
My eyes crossed: he had lost me. "Teraflop? Fall to earth?"
"Not quite. One teraflop equals exactly one trillion floatingpoint
calculations per second. So you can see that this little baby is really in
the big league. One thing that helps as well is the fact that all the memory
is nanobased.
We have invented and patented a molecular nanomemory where rows of molecules
