Home → Magazine Archive → December 1990 (Vol. 33, No. 12)
Table of Contents
Editorial pointers
James Maurer
Page 5
News track
Rosalie Steier
Pages 9-10
President's letter
John R. White
Pages 13-ff.
ACM forum
Robert L. Ashenhurst
Pages 14-15
Computing perspectives: the rise of the VLSI processor
Around 1970 Intel discovered it could put 2,000 transistors—or perhaps a few more—on a single NMOS chip. In retrospect, this may be said to mark the beginning of very large-scale integration (VLSI), an event which had been long …
Maurice V. Wilkes
Pages 16-ff.
Real-time data acquisition at mission control
Perhaps one of the most powerful symbols of the United States' technological prowess is the Mission Control Center (MCC) at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston. The rooms at Mission Control have been witness to major …
John Muratore, Troy Heindel, Terri Murphy, Arthur Rasmussen, Robert McFarland
Pages 18-31
An empirical study of the reliability of UNIX utilities
The following section describes the tools we built to test the utilities. These tools include the fuzz (random character) generator, ptyjig (to test interactive utilities), and scripts to automate the testing process. Next, we …
Barton P. Miller, Louis Fredriksen, Bryan So
Pages 32-44
Experiences with the Amoeba distributed operating system
The Amoeba project is a research effort aimed at understanding how to connect multiple computers in a seamless way [16, 17, 26, 27, 31]. The basic idea is to provide the users with the illusion of a single powerful timesharing …
Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Robbert van Renesse, Hans van Staveren, Gregory J. Sharp, Sape J. Mullender
Pages 46-63
Diffusion in computing networks: the case of BITNET
Using BITNET as a model, the author examines the adoption pattern of computing networks from the perspectives of innovation diffusion theory and economics.
Vijay Gurbaxani
Pages 65-75
Inside RISKS: risks in medical electronics
The RISKS Forum has had many accounts of annoying errors, expensive breakdowns, privacy abuses, security breaches, and potential safety hazards. However, postings describing documented serious injuries or deaths that scan be
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Jonathan Jacky
Page 138