Personal computer traits

[LYNCH@usc-isib]

One quality that a personal computer has to have is that is has
to tackle non baby problems. Two examples: WE have an IBM 5120
system to do some internal financial expenditure tasks. The
software from IBM is rather reasonable for this task. (The
5120 is a small business system that costs around $20K.) Well,
we have had to contort the heck out of the software to accomodate
the size of the transaction file we need to use. Result -- the
system runs incredibly slowly due to "overlays".
Second example: We also have an Apple. I run Visicalc to do
financial forecasting/modelling/budgeting. Visicalc is incredibly
simple to use and to get results from in minutes. But don't try
to run anything other than a toy problem on it. It is memory
bound (both in real and virtual address space) as implemented
on the Apple.
Conclusion: PCs have to have a "daddy" machine to toss the
problems to when the PC cannot handle the size of the data
(either in address space or in quantity of processing).
The "daddy" machine must execute the application packages with
no modification. The "daddy" machine must be trivially accessible
to the PC machine (on a common network).

The PCs that are on the current horizon are all "unique" products.
They are not part of larger product lines from
standard computer manufacturers. (There must be a message in there
somewhere about "revolution"!) somewhere about "revolution!\!"!) Are we
walking into a trapwalking into a trap?

Dan
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