Richard J. Timpone, Sage Monograph Abstract Monograph Abstract Taber, Charles S., and Richard J. Timpone. 1996. Computers have opened a new world in the few decades since their creation. Across all of society, as well as in academia, computers revolutionize our lives. But these two areas do not exhaust the utility of computers in the social sciences.
Computers offer more than platforms and on-ramps.
They can serve as special purpose analytic tools. Computational modeling has been a rising trend in the social sciences over the last three decades. For several reasons, we believe this trend will accelerate. First, computers are far more powerful, reliable, and affordable than ever before. Contemporary personal computers based on Pentium or RISC processors have similar capabilities to the supercomputers of a few years ago.