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Sept. 10, 1997

The rise of non-tangible computing

The story

The September 1997 issue of IEEE Computer contains a fascinating article by Ted Lewis, part of his ongoing Binary Critic column.

Although you probably would not guess it from the title, Digitopolis Meets Encalming Technology, the article is about non-tangible, non-visible computing: computers embedded deep down in seemingly non-computer-related devices. According to Lewis such applications are the only hope for the microprocessor industry, since traditional, tangible computers don't have enough of a market to justify the zillions in investment needed for new chip factories ("fabs").

A couple of juicy quotes:

Tangible computing has one big problem: it has very few users. Various estimates place the non-PC, embedded-systems market at 1000 times bigger than the huge PC industry. According to Tom Portante of Ernst and Young, over 2 billion chips and microcontrollers were sold worldwide in 1994 in contrast to 10 million personal computers...
A new car from General Motors contains $675 of steel and $2,500 of electronics, which includes computers in the air-bag and antilock braking systems. Electric shavers contain 2 Kbytes of software, and color TVs contain 500 Kbytes. As global PC sales reach 100 million, embedded systems will expand to at least 1000 times as many units. Therefore, the business of "sense and communicate" is already many times larger than "compute and store".

Read the complete article for more, in particular Lewis's two scenarios: "going tangible" versus "encalming devices".

Our comment

"Traditional" uses of computing (in an industry where "traditional" means at least one year old!) are not going away any time soon, but embedded systems are clearly one of the most action-charged areas of development. As enthusiastic users of the first release of Embedded Eiffel have commented, Eiffel is an ideal vehicle for embedded systems development, through its combination of high performance, focus on reliability, advanced multithreading and automatic memory management, close integration with the C/C++ world, and portability. Read the Embedded Eiffel presentation for more details.

Reference

Digitopolis Meets Encalming Technology by Ted Lewis, in IEEE Computer, volume 30, no. 9, September 1997, pages 136,134-135.

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