What will we do with all that bandwidth?
Fred J. Maryanski · ACM SIGSMALL Newsletter · 1982
Let's skip the business (except for a few items) and do something technical this time. You have all heard about the recent developments in local network technology that will permit to communicate between machines at rates of 10 Mega bits per second or higher. On first blush, these high speed interconnections might be viewed as THE breakthrough that will allow "true" distributed computing without painful delays. However, more careful consideration of the problem leads to a slight dampening of our fervor. First, we must realize tht a high speed interconnection will not make computers or disks run any faster than they do at the moment. Many small systems are simply not capable of utilizing a 10 Mbit link even if their entire capacity were devoted to reading or writing packets. With more powerful CPU's, it is possible to construct a system that will transfer data between machines at close to the speed of the disks. Several file transfer protocols have been implemented which operate close to disk speed, but which utilize only a small percentage of the communication bandwidth. Once the disk becomes the limiting factor, extra bandwith on the communications link can not improve performance.