Computer Supplement in 1975

University central computing needs in Britain are provided for by an increasingly unified set of machines. The next step is likely to involve more comprehensive networking.

The pre-eminent position of the central computer installation to which programs and data are submitted, to emerge hours or days later, is being challenged by the minicomputer, which offers considerable computer power to individuals at the time and place they require it.

As page composition from digitised information replaces the manual assembly of type, the printing industry struggles to absorb a technology in which the compositor becomes a computer operator and the production controller a systems analyst.

Charles Babbage dreamed up a form of computer in the 1830s. His ideas lay dormant until digital machines became a reality in the 1940s. Professor Wilkes, one of those responsible for the implementation of the digital computer, describes some of the prehistory and early history.

We usually use our previous experience in solving a present problem, and ‘intelligence’ is the name of the mechanism by which we do this. A programmed computer should not be deemed intelligent unless it is functionally similar to the brain in its use of previous experience.

How desirable and inevitable are large heterogeneous, distributed computer networks? In this article Professor Kirstein, whose group at University College London operates one node of the large international ARPA network, describes the motivation for setting up such networks and the problems which must be resolved before they are deployed more widely. Those problems are often more political and sociological than technical.