Computers—Present and future: Introduction to the symposium

Computers have become an important aspect of the scientific community, even though their use may present certain social problems. In the social environment, one has to be aware that computers are only pieces of equipment. They are great intellectual tools, and there is great intellectual effort to understand these tools. In the service sector of our economy, the most important tool to attain productivity is the computer. It also serves to a lesser extent in that part of the economy that concentrates in manufacturing, but we will leave that for others and another time. Here we will deal with computers in our scientific endeavor. A computer basically has five boxes: a memory box, an execution box, an instruction box, an input box, and an output box. If one looks at some of the very large computers or very small ones, I doubt whether you would recognize or be able to identify the specific boxes, but the functions are there. Computers have had and are having an appreciable impact on science. This is a comparatively recent event. They basically were developed during and after World War II to deal with some very large numerical problems-for example, partial differential equations of large size-for which a manual approach would be too laborious. There were and are other uses, such as making and breaking codes. Some of our leading mathematicians have played a role. Computers in this application manipulate symbols. There are times when we lose track of that piece of history. The increased use of the stored-program digital computer has put an end to analogue computer use and development. It is rare to find a person who still uses a slide rule. Large storedprogram computers dominate big science. They dominated most of the work in particle physics, whether in an experimental sense or in a theoretical sense. Numerical weather prediction is another area. Now, we are reaching an era when small science can survive only by using the new small computers. Every laboratory in mall science now has a computer of one sort or another, a small one. This has been made possible by a number of engineering and technological advances. One has been the reduction in the cost and the size of the various parts of the computer. The second is that the younger generations feel quite at home sitting at a computer terminal. The young are not afraid of programming any more. They are completely relaxed in dealing with the computer, and this is not true of those whose apprentices they were in the laboratories. It is part of their life now in the laboratory; this was not so 15 years ago. A third and very important aspect is that the input and output mechanisms are now much more in tune with the human. In some, the input and output mechanisms are represented by the same box. You just throw a "switch" to move from input to output. * Presented on 21 April 1980 at the Annual Meeting of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Symposium chairman: E. R. Piore.