This year Nvidia delivered its Tesla line of computing machines built around graphics processors.
This year Nvidia delivered its Tesla line of muscle-bound computing machines built around graphics processors.
It was clear in the mid-1970s that individual computing machines were the future.
Engineers there had created a server the size of a circuit board, run off a microprocessor designed to work with power-stingy laptops, not brawny computing machines.
All that began to had began to change a century or so ago with the discovery of Boolean algebra and the construction of the first modern computing machines.
Ultimately, better management could set the stage for software applications sold not through big packages but by use of discrete parts of an overall package--much the way IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ), HP and others talk about selling computing not by individual machines, but by how many processors a customer actually uses.
Cloud computing is more than the machines and resources that run and deliver IT services.
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Beyond that trend, Sowah says that the movement toward cheaper, more practical machines is about computing technology meeting the needs of people, instead of vice versa.
Andy Clark, a director and trustee of the National Museum of Computing, said the vintage machines helped to generate interest in technology: "People come along, look at them, get engaged and interested, and that's our next generation of computer scientists".
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The performance of a virtual machine, for example, may vary widely, based on the computing taking place on the other virtual machines that are running on the same physical machine.
Ever since the birth of modern computing, programmers have wanted to turn their machines into language processors.
Along with millions of other out-of-date and unsecured PCs strung together by the Internet--what Corman calls "the leper colony"--those machines represent a combined mass of computing power responsible for most of the Net's spam e-mails, much of its click fraud, and the vicious "denial of service" attacks that can knock sites offline and even destroy online businesses altogether.
In their zeal to rewrite the rules of computing for first-time users, OLPC shipped machines with a cumbersome operating system.
They do not need to invest in new hardware or technology staff, nor install software on existing computers, as all the computing takes place on Salesforce.com's machines.
The company hopes to build demand by pitching them as cost-saving "print on demand" machines that work best when connected to HP computing hardware.
The resources of those individual machines will then be pooled to create a massive computing "grid, " a virtual computer that is more powerful than the fastest supercomputers.
It was aimed initially at a group of people who for reasons of cost or power requirements still had desktop machines, but wanted access to lightweight and limited mobile computing.
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Corporate computing started out highly centralized on mainframes and other room-size machines, but since the introduction of the PC has been going through swings between the autonomy of the individual computer user and centralized management by the IT department.
Another example was that entire breakdown of the computing systems (and thus bill payments, direct debits and even ATM machines) at the same banking group a month or two back.
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Netbooks were terrible machines, a technological blight that threatened to become the future of computing.
The opportunistic and strategic sides of it have to do with the fact that security is increasingly going to be more and more important in all types of computing, not just PCs and servers but in smartphones, tablets, ATM machines and Internet-connected cars.
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But it has only been in the past two years or so that the combination of computing and networking technologies became inexpensive enough to be cost-effective on industrial sewing machines.
International Business Machines Corporation was incorporated in the State of New York on June 16, 1911, as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co.
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