THE BANISHMENT OF lYWER,vvORK

It is particularly interesting to note how close to the mark he was in his predictions of the state of the art in hardware. However, in his own specialty area - learning - he underestimated the difficulty of developing systems that learn from experience. We can only hope that we will not be as far off in actuality as we believe George Orwell to be, or as far off in our time scale as were Charles Babbage and his almost equally famous interpreter, Lady Lovelace Where, then, will the computer be in 1984? Computers are not going to get much bigger; in fact, they are going to get very much smaller, that is smaller in physical size, while retaining all of their presently envisioned computational capabilities. They will, of course, have access to very much bigger memories, memories which in fact can contain the total sum of man's recorded information, but this is already technically possible today.