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OCR for page 21
INTRODUCTION
The papers in Part II sketch some historical relationships between
basic research and industrial practice in computing. m e areas
surveyed have been chosen as characteristic; they are not
comprehensive. For a more thorough (albeit slightly outdated)
technical survey, the reader may wish to consult the Computer Science
and Engineering Research Study (COSERS) report, What Can Be Automated?
(edited by Bruce W. Arden, MIT Press, 1980~.
Paper 2 of Part II, about integrated circuits in general and
microprocessors in particular, examines currents in these most
characteristic and exploding fields of hardware technology. Basic
research in computer science has played a minor role here. Without
hardware there would be no computing, but without applications there
would be no hardware. m is consideration motivates Paper 7, which
considers large-scale scientific and engineering computation. m is
field, whose needs inspired the first computers, is an area of
computing where research and applications go hand-in-hand.
Systems software, the subject of Paper 1, has become to computing
what government is to civilization: an indispensable component that
pervades and shapes other productive activity. Systems software ideas
have come from research institutions as well as from industry, often as
much in response to the possibilities of technology as to the needs of
users. A degree of theoretical maturity is beginning to be attained in
some areas, as illustrated by Paper 4, which shows how one kind of
systems software has passed from the hands of practical inventors,
through the theoreticians, into codified academic training.
It took several decades for computer science to gain legitimacy as
a discipline. By now, it is well enough established to have developed
a pure as well as an applied wing. Paper 3 describes the way in which
this theory influences the computer science curricula, and thus
influences the course of industrial development into which graduates
are drawn. Another university-dominated field, pure in the sense that
it has traditionally been unconcerned with immediate practicality, is
artificial intelligence (Paper 5~. Despite years of industrial
inattention, and considerable early overselling, this lively branch of
academic research has contributed important techniques to modern
computing practice.
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OCR for page 22
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The most visible industrial computing falls under the rubrics of
"scientific. computing, such as airframe design and refinery
scheduling, and "data processing,. such as accounting and reservations
systems. Organized computer science has always been concerned with the
former activity (Paper 7) and with general systems issues (Paper 9) but
rarely with data processing per se (Paper 8~.
The application of computers to very large scale integrated {VLSI)
circuit chip design (Paper 2) is a research area of growing
importance. Moreover, Japanese success has heightened awareness of
another area of computing of potential importance to industry, namely
robotics (Paper 61.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
automated organized
