Turing Machines

[Human No More]

Originally Posted by Clarke

I think you need to go a couple of steps up if you want to use less than planets' worth of materials in said computer. You need to start directly executing the "program", not just blindly simulating hardware and hoping you've got everything hooked up right.

Remember those?
Never assume improvement will stagnate. Remember Moore's law.

I run virtual machines on my computers all the time - as far as the OS there can see, it's running on normal hardware, because all possible functions are implemented on top of the physical layer. Would that have been possible on a 286? no.