Running off the sun : ILLUMINATION books

— means completely re-thinking our approach to hardware and software.

This screen, for instance, might very well be a page from a book.

To get it here has taken three and a half gigabytes of Windows, plus a lot more display programming.  And, as a pictorial Web page itself, it’s taking up some 90 kilobytes of memory on a server somewhere.

On the LIGHTBOOK, it would look just as it does here, but it would need a mere 3 Kb of memory — thirty times less — to store, and the software displaying the whole book would occupy a mere 40 Kb — so little that it’s built into every ILLUMINATION book along with the pages themselves.

We must, you see, ask the right questions of our hardware and our program, working together.    Not “What can we do with the X kilobytes we have?” but “What is the very smallest number of machine instructions we need in order to transfer a page from memory onto the screen?  And how little memory can we get away with in order in storing that page?”

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In both cases the answer is:- “So little that we can do it using just the power from a solar panel the size of our lid.”