Quotes About Minicomputer

Formed a decade earlier by a Whirlwind engineer, Digital was a rising star among minicomputer suppliers, who broke sharply with tradition. In the past, computer designers had promoted large mainframes that shared their power between many jobs. Minicomputers, often priced well below a hundred thousand dollars, made it practical for the first time to dedicate a computer to a single job, such as keeping track of parts, the data for an experiment or the operation of a machine tool. Though

ARPA should not force the research computers at each site to handle the routing of data, Clark argued. Instead ARPA should design and give each site a standardized minicomputer that would do the routing.