In its tramline obsession with inflation, the benighted British government can find another target ripe for attack in the computer industry, where inflation – of the linguistic type at least – is endemic, and none of the major companies in the business seems to understand that it is in the nature of the business that power at a given price and application point doubles every couple of years or so: in five years’ time an 80486-based personal computer will be regarded as a puny little micro, yet in IBM’s argot, the thing is no longer a personal computer, it’s a workstation; Digital Equipment Corp’s VAX 9000 has a minicomputer architecture and sits on the performance curve predicted for the VAX at this stage of the game, yet DEC insists the thing is a mainframe; at this rate, again in five years’ time, you won’t be able to buy anything that isn’t described as a supercomputer, and companies like Cray Research Inc will be racking its brains to think up an appropriate term to follow Terahypercomputer.
