All About Polymorphics (sound)

[Music] thank you [Music] this film is about an idea an idea we call the polymorphic concept of data processing system design which is a complicated name for an idea we admit but the idea itself isn't so complicated when you think of it in terms of how people get machines to help solve their problems now if you have a problem to be computed to a computer and as your problems get bigger you need a bigger computer as more and more guys like you have problems to solve they take turns on the computer which isn't so bad if the computer is fast enough which it can be if it is big enough and expensive enough but as the number of guys and the number of problems increase the machine gets huge isn't that a waste because while one guy is using the computer to solve an easy problem which may only be taking one thousandth of the computer everyone else has to wait unless you spend still more money and buy a still bigger computer but worse if one piece fails the whole computer will probably quit even though most of it is perfectly good ready and willing to work what's wrong here to start with if you look inside you see that it isn't just one solid hunk of computer but a lot of individual parts and circuits which each have specialized functions now it would be nice if someone would divide the huge computer into little parts on sort of the connections so that everybody could get a chance to use the parts he needs for his particular problem next you will want to organize things a little not in the usual way where the brainy computer part not only supervises everything but also insists on doing a large share of the detailed work what you want is more delegation a more easy-going Cooperative relationship between all the parts so that they can associate freely and directly with one another and in various ways isn't this a lot of fun actually of course the electronic boxes don't move you just make a nice flexible automatic switchboard connection like the telephone company does that way the computer boxes the real brains of the system don't have to waste their time and talents acting like telephone operators trying to handle every single message personally I can stick to Computing and let the other boxes do the detail work such as remembering large number of facts or sending messages from one box to another or carrying out simple logical routines and so each computer box doesn't have to be so big now this is distributed control distributed memory distributed arithmetics distributed everything and it makes sense because now more than one guy can be using the system at the same time to solve a number of easy problems and when those occasional crash problems come along your system can reconnect itself in a matter of microseconds to get the big urgent jobs done as well as an ordinary giant computer could do them and one box quits it's no great catastrophe the system just automatically switches the job to another box if you find yourself getting the busy signal too often you buy more of exactly the kind of boxes you need that's like adding on new subscribers as they move in or you can add more displays so that more people can see what goes on newer problem calls for a lot of detailed work to do most of the time then you buy boxes to give you all the memory or Messenger Service or whatever else you need on the other hand if your problems are mostly heavy duty brain work you can load your system up with computer boxes when you really need it and can prove you need it you can put together a big system or even a really really big one without over investing early or throwing anything away or starting from scratch again so you save money and all the while you have better reliability and multiple use and better access you can even switch together two complexes or three or four like a Nationwide telephone system or you can connect in one of those ordinary giant computers as a subscriber if you go for super systems and this doesn't mean that you end up with one big party line you can keep some of the lines private by opening a few switches permanently so that certain information won't be available to nosy subscribers and so now you see that it wasn't just exactly a computer you wanted but a group of guys with brains and a group of boxes with electronic brains and consoles and displays all connected together in varying ways and growing together so that the partnership can solve more problems per dollar then each group could solve by itself and this is all there is to the data processing concept known as polymorphic many shaped or multiple mode or the Matrix concept or maybe just a common sense switchboard idea in data processing system now it just so happens that Thompson removal Rich has been working on the polymorphic idea for several years and in case you hadn't already guessed we have built the first actual polymorphic system if you're interested let us know [Music] foreign [Music]