Intelligent terminals: rationale and implications

Continuing reductions in cost of LSI logic and memories is making it increasingly attractive from an economic standpoint to include processing and computing capability in terminals. At the same time, communications costs are remaining constant or decreasing at a much lesser rate. Therefore, maintaining a properly balanced telecommunication system requires distributing, processing, and computing functions to the terminals in many cases. A number of manufacturers are now offering smart or intelligent terminals which include varying degrees of processing and computing capability which can be used to handle part of the users processing and computation tasks and to reduce the load on the communications lines and the central processor. On the other hand the economy of scale still favors centralized mass storage and certain types of applications require a central data base to permit multiple users to access and update the same large files.