Systems Of Engagement
March 17, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The language may change from time to time in the computer industry, but the problems do not. Vice presidents of data processing are now chief information officers. Instead of trying to create massive systems to deal with telemetry from an array of radar stations, as IBM did with the SAGE project in the 1950s and what at the time was the most ambitious computer ever built (with over 60,000 vacuum tubes and an estimated cost of between $8 billion and $12 billion when it was completed in 1963), we have the Googleplex of well over 1 million servers that spans |