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The Grid
The Grid is Peter Seibel's 2009 Nanowrimo effort.
It takes place in a near future when Moore’s Law has crashed. The number of transistors that can be fit into a single integrated circuit, and with it the performance of computers per dollar spent, no longer double every two years. By the time The Grid begins, it has stopped growing altogether.
Around the same time as computer performance stopped rising exponentially, energy costs started to. Exacerbated by the ill-timed collapse of Moore’s Law, it was too late to find alternative energy sources. Once Moore’s Law crashed, the cost of developing those technologies started to rise since designing new solar panels or efficient wind turbines required lots of computation and computation was no longer cheap.
Soon it made no sense for anyone but a few companies to run their own computers and computing moved onto the grid. After an intense period of competition all the grid computing powers either merged or died until there was a single Grid, responsible for all the computation that happened on the planet. Users of the Grid have returned to a world of dumb terminals and computers run by a technological priesthood, tending to machines ensconced in air conditioned rooms, inaccessible to the lay public.
It takes place in a near future when Moore’s Law has crashed. The number of transistors that can be fit into a single integrated circuit, and with it the performance of computers per dollar spent, no longer double every two years. By the time The Grid begins, it has stopped growing altogether.
Around the same time as computer performance stopped rising exponentially, energy costs started to. Exacerbated by the ill-timed collapse of Moore’s Law, it was too late to find alternative energy sources. Once Moore’s Law crashed, the cost of developing those technologies started to rise since designing new solar panels or efficient wind turbines required lots of computation and computation was no longer cheap.
Soon it made no sense for anyone but a few companies to run their own computers and computing moved onto the grid. After an intense period of competition all the grid computing powers either merged or died until there was a single Grid, responsible for all the computation that happened on the planet. Users of the Grid have returned to a world of dumb terminals and computers run by a technological priesthood, tending to machines ensconced in air conditioned rooms, inaccessible to the lay public.
- GenresFiction
ebook
First published October 9, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 6, 2016
When I found out that a software professional had written a dystopian novel about the future of computing, I had to dig in. While it's no literary classic, and while it does occasionally sound slightly naïve when it comes to character/ story development, a highly recommended piece of work for programmers, software professionals, security professionals, cloud professionals, as well as everyone else.
October 16, 2015
I was surprised when I found out that Peter Seibel wrote a fiction book. I liked his Practical Common Lisp. This is a short fiction about hackers, living in not so distant future and fighting for free software and Freedom of information. Somehow, while reading the book, I associated Grid Co. with Amazon :). It's a great funky book with a lot of cool references that will be recognized by any programmer.
July 23, 2017
A nice easy read by a well-known software developer who covers technical topics with some authority.
The characters seem a bit shallow and the message of the book is a subtle as a sledgehammer, but A+ for technology accuracy.
The characters seem a bit shallow and the message of the book is a subtle as a sledgehammer, but A+ for technology accuracy.
July 4, 2021
This is a fun read!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews