How large should a computer be?

Abstract

The minicomputer invasion is bringing an end to the Renaissance Computer Age. The reasons for this are both technological and economical.Hardware costs have, because of LSI technology, diminished below the cost of complexity making general purpose k-way shared systems uneconomical for large values of k. On the otherhand, software development costs remain high due to complexity. Therefore, software complexity is forcing duplication of integrated hard/soft systems in place of hardware systems running a variety of programs.The hardware shift, as it is called, is also responsible for a shift in the type and number of computer applications. Shifts in applications lead eventually to greater hardware shifts. Viewed from an economic point-of-view the hardware shift is an "acceleration force" whose rate of change determines the size of future computers.