Systems implications of new memory developments: memoria ex machina

Abstract

Computer design has historically been limited by, and even largely determined by, available memory capability: speed, size, cost, and operational characteristics. Just as Edgar Allen Poe could create the entire complicated plot and counterplot of Dickens's "Barnaby Rudge" after reading the first installment, so can a really competent systems designer describe a well-designed computer system with considerable precision if he only knows what memories were available to the designers. The classical problems, such as serial vs. parallel, synchronous vs. asynchronous, even decimal vs. binary, all relate to ways of getting around problems with memory.