538 Making Key Strategic Decisions
computers that functioned using the UNIX operating system. While, in the
1970s, Bell Labs actually developed UNIX as an operating system for scientific
applications, it later became an accepted standard for commercial applications.
Platform independent, the operating system and its associated applications could
run on a variety of manufacturers’ computers, creating both opportunities for
users and competition within the computer industry. Users were no longer inex-
orably tied to one manufacturer. UNIX became the standard as companies
moved into the 1990s. However, standards changed rapidly in the nineties, and
UNIX has lost ground due to the development of client server technology.
In the early 1990s, technologists predicted the demise of the mainframe.
IBM’s stock declined sharply as the market realized that the company’s chief
source of margin was headed toward extinction. However, the mainframe has
reinvented itself as a super server, and, while it has been replaced for some of
the processing load, the mainframe and IBM are still positioned to occupy
important roles in the future.
Server technology is heading toward a design in which processors are built
around multiple, smaller processors, all operating in parallel. Referred
to as symmetrical multiprocessors (SMPs), there are between two and eight
processors in a unit. SMPs are made available by a range of manufacturers and
operating systems, and they provide processor power typically not available in a
uniprocessor. Faced with the demanding environment of multiple, simultaneous
queries from databases that exceed hundreds of gigabytes, processors with mas-
sively parallel processors, or MPPs, are being utilized more and more. MPPs
are processors that have hundreds of smaller processors within one unit. The
goal of SMPs and MPPs is to split the processing load among the processors.
In a typical factory in the 1800s, one motor usually powered all of the
machinery, to which it was connected by a series of gears, belts, and pulleys.
Today, that is no longer the case, as each machine has its own motor or, in some
cases, multiple, specialized motors. For example, the automobile’s main motor
is the engine, but there are also many other motors that perform such tasks as
opening and closing windows, raising and lowering the radio antenna, and pow-
ering the windshield wipers. Computers are the firm’s motors, and like motors,
they, too, have evolved. Initially, firms used a host centric mainframe, one
large computer; today, they are using many computers to perform both special-
ized and general functions.
In the early 1990s, Xerox’s prestigious Palo Alto Research Center intro-
duced “ubiquitous computing,” a model that it feels ref lects the way companies
and their employees will work in the future. In ubiquitous computing, each
worker will have available differing quantities of three different size comput-
ers: 20 to 50 Post-it note size portable computers, three or four computers the
size of a writing tablet, and one computer the size of a six-foot-by-six-foot
white board. All of the computers will work together by communicating to a
network through, in most cases, wireless connections.
The progress of chip technology has been highly predictable. In the early
1960s, Gordon Moore, the inventor of the modern CPU at Intel, developed