Agents for Change

The face of computing changes regularly – usually incrementally but occasionally in a revolutionary way. It used to be that software lagged behind hardware – that hardware changes were made but it was some time before software designers caught up and made full use of the hardware developments. In the last few years this has changed around. Now,software changes and demands drive hardware development. The new breed of friendly graphical user interface (GUI) software in which different packages talk to one another has resulted in major demands for more memory, faster disks, greater throughput, higher screen definitions and so on. Hardware manufacturers cannot keep up with the demand. Nor can the poor user.