The Coming Revolution in R&D/Technical Computing

At Hoechst Celanese, an RD (2) an improvement in the number and quality of computer applications able to handle research tasks. Another important factor has been the reception of these changes by the research community and their assimilation by individuals eager to exploit what they have mastered and found useful in performing the tasks at hand. The future will be based on a needs-driven component to be addressed below, as well as the meld of several hardware technologies on a common digital base. The coupling of those needs with new technology capabilities will help provide the vision of the future that is the theme of this article. A Confluence of Digital Technologies Many analog technologies in communications and information storage have been converging on a common digital technology base. That is, video/television, telephone, facsimile, copiers, photography, audio, information storage and recall, graphics, typesetting, publishing, text input scanning, and message switching have all been moving toward a single form made of bits and bytes transferred or stored in digital form. By 1995, the pervasive use of optical frequencies for communication will provide the essentially "infinite bandwidth" that will reach into all laboratories and offices and into the home as well. From the common digital technology base, the vague borders between some of the technologies--photography, laser printing, photocopying, and microfilm blowback, for example--will disappear, making publishing, storage and recall of textual material with graphics understood differently and defined in terms currently used for computing and word processing. New technologies will be defined along the boundaries of overlapping technologies; for example, voice messages, audio recording and telephone communications will be treated as data and will be recognized, parsed, edited, and compiled in the way we now do word processing. (One social ramification will be that photos, videotapes and audio recordings will no longer be admissible as legal evidence because the doctored form could be of an identical quality to the original piece.) Instead of the letters of the alphabet as the symbols processed by word processing, think of any text, image, sound, speech or message as the discrete piece that may be processed. Just as with CAD/CAM, whole assemblages may be moved, replicated and altered to any level of detail with the simple but powerful choice of the mouse or stylus on the design menu. The enabling technical factor is the extremely rapid, simultaneous data transfer afforded by broad-bandwidth optical communications and similar broad-bandwidth storage capability, for example, with high density optical disk storage. The Computing Environment The general understanding of the computing environment ten years ago did not predict the personal computer as the force in business or research it has become today. The current concept of the computing environment will become higher definition computer screens with keyboards and mouse devices for data input. There will be some use of voice input, as well as of input with handwriting recognition tablets. A simple sketch will be re-drawn as a cleaned-up drawing of circles, rectangles and straight lines. Structural chemical formulas will be easily input. Workstation environments will have computing power greater than that of current machines, but available on many desktops, and will be used for simulation and analysis. …