PART II – TECHNOLOGICAL IMPERATIVES

Publisher Summary This chapter explores the underlying reasons for the rapid evolution of technology and presents an examination of the state of other aspects of the computer technology arena. Mechanical systems have improved with the abilities to build better fabrication equipment and to better understand the mechanisms that underlie this area. The chapter also focuses on digital electronics, which has undergone an exponential decrease in cost per unit created. This dramatic improvement is because of large scale integration (LSI), which has become technologically feasible. Its use has also developed a set of market places that allows it to become economically feasible. Storage devices form the heart of the digital world. They are used for the holding of program and data and to increase the performance of the computers in caches, which are small buffers that sit in front of the main memory to improve its performance. The dominant part of the cost of a typical computer installation is in its memory. The chapter also discusses two potentially major changes in the storage technology: the charge coupled devices and bubble memory.