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Musings on TLE's Forum III

Future Computing

Anadarko Petroleum, The Woodlands, Texas, U.S.

Corresponding author: will_morse@anadarko.com

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

This article is in response to the special section "TLE Forum III: Future Computing" in the February 2003 TLE. As mentioned in one of the presentation transcripts, the future of computing will not proceed in the linear fashion many people expect ("more data, faster computers"). There are some important changes coming that I feel need to be discussed in more detail, however.

Computer operating systems succeed by best exploiting the hardware and cultural paradigms they inhabit. As these paradigms change so do the software systems, often radically. Going back into history we see that the concept of an "operating system" has changed greatly. In the early 1960s we had "initiators" which just started the next batch job in the card reader. Later, batch systems of the late 1960s and early 1970s (IBM's "OS" system being the archetypal example) developed. A radical change was made to the timesharing systems in the 1970s and early 1980s (typified by DEC's VMS). Personal systems (MSDOS) and networked operating systems (UNIX) came in the late 1980s and continue to the present. While on-line transaction processing systems (OLTP) such as CICS have existed for some time, the basic concept has gained a whole new life in the HTTP systems for the World Wide Web. These fairly radical changes came about not because of incremental improvements in existing software, but rather revolutionary advances because of the changes in the hardware and culture of computing.

In the early days an operating system was just a program to sequence "jobs" through the computer with minimal delays. Operating systems have since evolved into operating environments (OE). The OE has hundreds of programs that are not involved in "operating" the system, but provide utilities and functions that make up what we think of as the system. Examples include Windows in . . . [Full Text of this Article]