Introduction to Coupled Data Technologies

The past quarter-century has seen an explosive growth in the performance of computer systems. One of the first widely popular personal computers was a mid-1980s IBM PC, running on a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 processor, stuffed with 256 KB of system memory (plus another 384 KB on an expansion card), displaying 640x200 black-and-white graphics, and storing data on 360 KB 5.25-inch floppy disks. In 2009, a typical workstation configuration sold by Sun Microsystems, the Ultra 24 Workstation, used a 3 GHz Intel Quad Core 2 processor with 8 GB of memory, displayed 2560x1600 graphics on a 30-inch LCD monitor using an Nvidia Quadro NVS 290 accelerator card, with up to 1.8 TB of Serial-Attached SCSI drives spinning at 15 krpm.