modern realworld computing power makes BT computers look rather wimpy. this partly due to writer fiat, since the game dates back to when computers were still pretty wimpy in rea life and the feel established then has been the standard long enough to make updating it hard. but there is a in universe element to it as well.
battletech computing system use optical computers (as per the star league sourcebook), which in the BT timeline were invented in the 'late 20th century', meaning the 80's or 90's. (the timeline matches ours until around that point) on it's own optical computing sounds all fancy, right? the downside comes from the mechanics of optical computing. optical computers use photons instead of electrons for computing. an optical computer is basically a set of crystals and fibers whose internal structure creates logic gates that allow calculation. optical computing gives a great improvement over 1980's level electrical computing, but it would be far bulkier and use alot more power. and it can't be miniaturized as easily, so making improvements on it would be harder. this is why most BT computers are terminal systems. they are little more than a screen and a keyboard hooked up to a massive mainframe system somewhere else in the building. you can't build a 'desktop' optical computing rig capable of much more than basic 1970's-80's level desktop performance without nanoscale manufacturing, which BT doesn't have.
there is also an element of how it calculated. an electrical computer is a linear computing system. binary. great for doing mathmatical calculations fast. Optical computers have nonlinear, non-binary calculation capabilities. instead of just "off and on", they can also put out "sort of on", sort of off", and so on. they can't handle fast mathmatical calculations as well, but they are good at working with fuzzy logic. so an optical computer wouldn't be as good at calculating firing solutions for example (which is just crunching numbers fast), but would be able to do things like interprete EM imaging of the brain or controlling an inherently unstable vehicle, at a level greater than it's on-paper specs would imply to us.
and battletech builds nearly all their hardware to last, almost to the level of airline black-box systems. you can literally blow it out a location with a ton+ of explosives, and any intact components will still function perfectly well, able to be picked up and reused. this is one of the reasons the successor states manage to keep their surviving technology going during the 3rd and 4th succession wars after most of the support infrastrucutre was blasted to hell...and why there are mechs and parts in constant use for centuries. the stuff is so durable that to break it practically requires active sabotage. the downside of this 'ragnarok proofing', as some fans have taken to calling it? your bulk and mass goes up, and your performance goes down. (look at the 'space rated' electric computing stuff we have in real life. space probes run on processors that can be out performed by some modern calculators, but they can basically survive anything except destructive lithobraking (read: slamming into a planet) and still function. optical computing is more durable, but still suffers much the same problems.)
plus the issue of programming. from the novels, BT doesn't seem to have developed object based programming, like used in modern computers. indeed, their software seems to have more in common with pre-windows methods. in addition, they seem to use a lot of hardware dedicated methods, using the physical design of the computer to control many of the things we'd have a OS process or App do.this has been changing a bit lately, but not by much.
all of this means that you can't really give a one to one comparison of BT to real world computer capability, but from the setting material (novels, canon short stories, and other such fluff), modern computing systems are much more capable than BT computer systems in most cases...the main differences being in Artificial intellegence (which BT does better than us, though it's all soft AI), controlling mechs (which is an outgrowth of the AI stuff), and brain interfacing ( understanding the data from neurohelmets, direct neural interfaces, and so on.)
Edited by mithril coyote, 03 December 2011 - 07:48 PM.