The cutting edge of computer technology

Press, 23 October 1984, Page 39

The cutting edge of computer technology

For years we have had an artificial set of names given to computers which constructed artifical barriers. And, like all barriers, when the revolution quietened down, the barriers came tumbling down. In the beginning there was the mainframe, which was a cumbersome beast and used enough electricity to light a small town. But it would handle the complex transactions of large companies. It still does. Sometimes, at the speed of 12 million instructions per second. (The computer trade, which suffers from terminal addiction to acronyms, called these MIPS). Then came the minicomputer and, yes, it was coincidental with that marvel of female fashion. This computer took a fair amount of room, but would let several people work on it, each with his or her own terminal. It could perform different tasks at the same time. The mini was referred to as a multi-user machine. Minicomputers are still popular. They are especially loved by universities for their speed and power and are still giving the mainframe a hard time in the computer market. And then came the micro, which would sit on your desk and, typically, was designed for use by one person at a time. This was the start of the personal computer revolution. First came the Altair, the Sol (I had one) and then the Apple. After which all hell broke loose. Following closely in its tracks of the micro came the portable or luggable, which Hewlett Packard had the brass nerve of using as if it invented the word. The first of these machines was the Osborne, which was soon followed by many others. They will sit on your desk, but if you have a strong right arm you can lug one home in the evening so that the staff will think that you are working extra hard. Then came the lap computer, a computer which you can carry in your briefcase and on which you can perform — though not all — of the functions of a machine of greater size and unwieldiness.

By

GARETH POWELL

Now, all the barriers between these machines are being washed away. We have a lap computer — Hewlett Packard 110 — which is more powerful than many micros. We have a micro — the quite amazing Cromemco 3000, fathered by Dr Harry Garland — which is, as far as I can work out, more powerful than anything now on the market To give you an example, with certain configurations it can, like a mainframe, process 12 million instructions a second, although it normally idles along processing a million instructions per second, which is still more than somewhat. More and more, it appears that computers may differ in size and appearance, but their speed, power and memory capacity moves closer and closer each day. To talk of a micro like the Cromemco 3000 as if it were of a lesser breed than a minicomputer is clearly daft. Soon, the only true way to classify computers will be as to their intended use — not their size. And what you can see is a migration of the strength and virtues of mainframe machines down to the ranks until they end up in. a machine that is the size of a reasonable hard cover book. Because of this downward migration, it is possible to see very clearly where the personal computer industry will be in 10 years. All we have to do is look at what is already happening at other, larger, levels. Indeed, if I were to become a personal computer futurologist (a singularly unattractive word with a wide currency in the computer industry) I would think of no better way of performing the job than watching the amazing 1 Dr Garland and what he does with Cromemco. I spent some time talking to him recently about the way in which computers are travelling. Bear in mind, that this man runs one of the most successful computer companies in the world — he is

just 37 years old — and he has been doing just that since 1975. It was Dr Garland who predicted the Apple revolution. His original training at Stanford University in the United States was as a biophysicist, but he became fascinated with computers. His first effort was a colour graphics board called the “Dazzler” which then produced a quality of Shies which other manuirers are now starting to achieve. His company has kept that sort of lead over the years and, more importantly, has remained afloat while many other computer companies wait for the dry dive. Dr Garland keeps pushing ahead to new frontiers with each machine that he launches. What Cromemco does today, he will have on a personal computer tomorrow. Start off with memory. Until relatively recently, the amount of memory that you could have in a personal computer was severely limited. If you had 64K of memory on the machine, you used to swank about it. When I started, in what are now effectively known as the Dark Ages, if you had 8K of memory to play with you were at the cutting edge of computer technology. Now, 200, 500, even 750 K memory is quite common, and, no doubt, memories will get larger yet. Powell’s third rule of programming states that a program will expand to just exceed the amount of memory available. We now have programs that need over 500 K of memory in the machine before they will work properly. Look ahead five years and we will see personal computers with 20 megabytes of memory on the board. That is 20.000 K. How do I know this? Because Dr Garland has already done it as an option on his Cromemco 3000. (If the name worries you, as it did me, it is named after Crothers Memorial Hall, which was a dormitory at

Stanford University where the two founders of the company once resided). With that much memory to play with, the “everything” program will exist and you will be able to load it in one fell swoop on to your machine, get all your working information from your hard disk drive (we’ll have hard disks by then, holding at least 50 megabytes, but probably one Gigabyte, which is a thousand megabytes which is a million kilobytes, which is more space than you will use in three years of fairly intensive use) and then work with the machine at speeds now beyond our comprehension. The personal computer of the future will not just have one microprocessor — it will have several. Dr Garland told me so. He has puts lots in his machines, some acting as co-processors so that they can streak through one part of a program on one microprocessor, while yet another takes care of a separate chore. Some he has put on so that users can choose from a wide range of languages. There is even one with its own 64K of memory, just to work the keyboard. Such microprocessors are relatively cheap, and they are an amazingly efficient way of making the small machine believe that it is a computing giant. The colour on our personal computers is going to improve beyond the resolving ability of the human eye. Cromemco already has the ability to do that, but they hold their machines back because their ability far outstrips current popular video technology and there is little point in racing that far ahead of the pack. When these wonders come to pass — and they will, they surely will — there will be little or no point in talking about whether a computer is a mainframe or a portable. Because of the power available, because of the speed available, because of the quality of output available, all computers will be born equal. Arid a computer revolution will, at long last, have achieved equality for all.