The short answer if there is any "there" there for photonic computing is no, maybe.
You need to understand quantum physics[3,2]. For example, photonic computing, photonic logic does not have a switch equivalent as semiconducting (CMOS transistor) or superconducting (Josephson Junction JJ) but we have a photonic Mach Zener interferometer (MZI) and a photon detector.
Photonics and superconducting electronics is always going to be much larger in size (and therefore more expensive) than semiconductors build from few atoms.
In quantum physics photonics we have advantages like quantum impedance, you can replace wires with photon transmitters and photodetectors and thus switch with only a few photons instead of large numbers of electrons.
With photonics you can have billions of cheap low power data channels instead of high power wire bundles. But MZI as JJ will probably always be a few orders of magnitude larger than transistors so switching is not going to be better, but interferometry is.
Shorter answer still: just low power communications and information processing yes, computing no.
Bulk CMOS manufacturing is still cheaper than all the alternatives we have discovered or invented, until we learn to manufacture atom by atom or compute with single photons or electrons (also dependent on molecule by molecule self-assembly), we will stay with CMOS and Moore's law.
Just listen to David B. Millers[1] lectures [2], his lectures are a shortcut to reading all his papers[2] that explain it all, especially [3].
Email me, I'll give you a private lecture.
Your question's anwer is/was a summary of our whole lives research [4]:
Thank you Matthew Dugal, but no thanks. You just created a bad GUI of a bloated database as a shaky web server.
I am using a few of your photo's but as a database I just filled a spreadsheet (poor man's database) that I can turn into a website hosted at home with two clicks: Squeak with Seaside, Magritte and Pier CMS (swiki). I then render a catalogue PDF with another few clicks for the LLMs. Total time for setup from zero 82 minutes, mostly the time to search the files on my spotlight indexed 400 TB harddisk.
The Byte magazines are extra searchable documentation for the Retro Computing stuff (from capacitors to fix old CRT monitors, cables to wire up coax, ADB, SCSI, IEEE-488 and Appletalk, whole computers, Transputer supercomputers, IBM Risc 1000, early FPGA's) and ways to do SEO: if people search for Lisa than Byte text OCR-ed will find Macintosh XL and my web page catalogue and they see I have several for sale.
There is a faster way still, just get you stuff in a csv tab delimited list and render it into a html file and host it on my first webserver september 2 1991 [2] or today on one of the few free webhosting options left: https://100yeararchive.neocities.org
When I started the first public ISP in 1987, several years before the first web page (on August 6, 1991 [2]), I just hosted my collectables and magazines (The same as I offer here today, I still have them 49 years later), photo's and hardware on hyper cards, mailing lists, uucp, usenet, FTP or Gopher. Webpages we also hosted on the unix home directory of my customers next to their pop email box. I think of your proposal as: the early internet is a great improvement on its successors.
You can literally upload CSV files to this. Or zip files with folder structures. But ok, you do you. Thanks for the insults jerk.
But let's clarify something. You say you are using my photos. Are you referring to the hosted version of my personal photos, without attribution? Or are you referring to the images in the github repo, which themselves have CC attribution in the readme?
Also why did you bloviate so much about yourself here? Was it to make yourself seem more important? Because honestly you come off as a real asshole Merick.
>> But ok, you do you. Thanks for the insults jerk.
ROFL. Didn't you notice he's Dutch? And old (add insult to injury).
Expect extreme absence of delicacy from the Dutch, they simply lack that gene.
Then again, your comment was a complete, shameless plug of promoting your own crap, in total disregard of what the man said. Someone had to say it to you.
>> Also why did you bloviate so much about yourself here? Was it to make yourself seem more important? Because honestly you come off as a real asshole Merick.
I would bet on "I'm old and I don't care".
What I'm curious though is why would he sell the physical collection.
> Then again, your comment was a complete, shameless plug of promoting your own crap, in total disregard of what the man said. Someone had to say it to you.
It was, it's fine. But it's also something I spent 6 months on, purpose built for his scenario, and most importantly released under MIT license without charge.
And yeah, I totally didn't notice he was Dutch. I'm used to rude, but the whole pivot to his life accomplishments was quite gross and repulsive.
Compiler writing has progressed a lot. Notably in meta compilers [1] written in a few hundred lines of code and adaptive compilation [3] and just in time compilers.
Alan Kay's research group VPRi tackled the problems of complexity (in writing compilers) [4].
Or Hacker News for that matter. Never trust anything on the internet [1] on face value. Start by asking qui bono? Is this a reputable source, like a scientist[2]?. Be critical and sceptical.
An apartment inside an apartment complex is still inside the same building. Earth is in the Universe. There's a difference between "in the Universe" and "outside of Earth".
A superset also includes everything in all its subsets.
Apple had real Unix a decade before the Linux crap was made, a bad unix copy. Nextstep was much better than Linux crap. "A budget of bad ideas" is what Alan Kay said about Linux [1], he invented the personal computer.
My 1987-1997 ISP was based on several different Unix running on Apple, probably long before you where born.
Yes, I ran it also on 68000 and PowerPC Macs. I preferred MacOS with all the MPW environment and tools on top, the GUI was much better: a full WYSIWYG text editor that also was the command line, so you could compose text, copy and paste and also execute it. But that was invented with the workspace in Smalltalk-76 and recreated with MPW.
Email me if you need help restoring it on your Mac, or if you need parts to revive your hardware. I have at least one of every Mac since 1982 (yes I know the Lisa was introduced in januari 1983) including all floppies, CD-ROMs, books, screens, keyboards mice, Appletalk. Although some parts have rusted or decayed beyond repair. I hope someday somebody will buy the whole museum from me.
The best quality Unix we ran was BSDi, you'll find some of that still in NetBSD, OpenBSD and maybe FreeBSD.
The coolest Unix was IRIX though, but that was because of the Grafix code, not the Unix kernel.
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