I have been involved with computers since I was 9 years old. For my birthday, in 1979, I received a book called “Z-80 and 8080 Assembly Language Programming”, by Kathe Spracklen. This was an eye opening introduction to the idea of machine language and the potential power of computers long before household PCs, decades before the internet. For over a year, I was coding in pencil and paper, to study and learn this strange new world. The following Christmas, I was given a Timex Sinclair 1000, the American version of the Sinclair ZX81. Over the next few years, IBM came out with the first PC. Commodore and Texas Instruments, Atari and Amiga, Apple and Amstrad, even Radio Shack got in on the action. Needless to say, they were heady years of infinite possibilities just forming. The internet was only a science fiction motif, the Cyber Space, the Net, the Grid, the Matrix, a vision of the future that was becoming increasingly real.
In the late 80’s I became equally fascinated by models of consciousness and cognition, technical studies of biological neurons and brains. I saw a perfect overlap of concepts. The digital representation of an organic model that is known to run at the speed of human thought and runs at about 20 watts, 200 watts if you include the rest of the body, became my vision. The efficiency of our biology is absolutely staggering. Somewhere between the brutally spare usage of sparce resources required by 8 bit hardware, and the vast potential of a human mind, I sensed a gap that could be bridged. In the early 1990’s, I was writing primitive neural networks in machine code and increasingly in despair at the hardware requirements that my design demanded. I gave up on it for a very long time, worked my way through becoming an adult, became a proficient I.T. man, the Friendly Neighborhood computer guy. But coding had to wait.
The hardware has finally caught up, and I must return to my roots.