In the little over a half century since the first commercial computer was introduced, there has been phenomenal improvement in the performance to price ratio of these devices, not to mention the significant reduction in size. In the summer before graduate school, I worked for a company which made me responsible for running a critical production computer which had 4 kilo-words of core memory, a 30 kilobyte drum, 1-inch magnetic tape drives, a paper tape reader, a crude assembler, no compiler, and required 1000 square feet of floor space. The machine was reported to have cost over $1 million. The cell phone in your pocket today dwarfs that early computer in processing power by several orders of magnitude. A friend sent me an email just last week saying that he had found a 500 gigabyte hard drive on sale for $100. His comment was that less than fifteen years ago when he was working on a project to provide movies on demand over a cable network, he priced out terabyte hard drives at $10 million each. Again we see five orders of magnitude improvement in performance to price in less than 15 years. A very relevant question for a systems innovator is what key improvements are to come? And, of course, the answer to that question depends on what systems innovators do in the years to come. To explore this topic, we will look at the promise of information technology, the challenges we face in realizing the promise, and some of the resources available to help guide the systems innovator.
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