Gordon Bell, Vice-President Digital Equipment Corporation.

The article presents the views of Gordon Bell, vice-president of Digital Equipment Corp., on developments in the computer industry and intercomputer communication. In the 1980s, users are expected to recognize a better interface for direct and indirect communication with their computers. Thus, the large computer population will force intercommunication and standardization among machines. The effect of minicomputers on the user population has been highly significant. Nearly all important features that minicomputers have such as floating-point and other data-type operations, paging and segmentation for better memory management and a reasonably large software library. Minicomputers are often connected to larger, more general purpose computers arranged at a higher level and thus, a hierarchy of computers can be created usually corresponding to hierarchies within the human organization. At present, programming languages are fundamentally special purpose and they solve problems within a particular context.