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City Fathers
A set of computer systems which run every mechanical system in a city. (Read the full article)
| "Another interesting aspect of the city fathers: they are mechanically separated. There is one scene where the human characters are watching city fathers trundle about. Apparently, they only make contact to repair and communicate. The repair part makes certain sense, but to a person living in our connected age of internet and cloud computing, it seems ludicrous. If Cities in Flight were written today, the "city fathers" might be primarily software, running on a substrate of connectivity." (Grapeshot 3/12/2010 1:40:53 PM ) |
| "This might seem be less ludicrous than it seems. Look at the Wikipedia entry "sneakernet". No matter how connected the world seems to be, there are reasons that certain computer systems are not connected to others all of the time. One reason is security. I've never read the stories in question, so I don't know if security is an issues with them. The other reason is bandwidth. In the Wikipedia entry it mentioned that sneakernets are used when datasets are just too large to send over the internet in a reasonable amount of time." (Jarrod 1/24/2011 12:12:30 PM ) |
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