Balancing materials, power, and cost in modern computer design
In Balance
"maddog" looks at the idea of balance in modern computer design – the trade-offs that must be made by designers to meet changing requirements.
A few years ago, I wrote an article about how much paper tape (used on an old ASR-33 Teletype) it would take to hold 1 terabyte (TB) of data. Without going into the detail of that particular article, I had figured out that it would take more than 6,330 years to read in or write out 2TB of paper tape, assuming the Teletype did not break in that time.
That was one illustration of the issue of "balance" – the various trade-offs that have been made by computer designers through the years to accommodate the technology on hand. Previously, devices were of such small capacity that large main memories did not make much sense.
To start with the easiest example of balance, try to imagine a modern-day cell phone built out of the transistors available in 1968. Some of those transistors cost $1.50, while a gallon of gasoline (about four liters) only cost 35 cents. The size of the transistor meant that your cell phone would probably cover the state of Texas, and the power requirements would both need the output of the world's largest hydroelectric plant and create a real danger of climate change on the spot.
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