The machine was hugely successful for its time, helping to encourage personal computing, popularise video games and pioneer homemade computer-created music.
While the Global Grid Forum acts as a clearinghouse of Grid standards, industry leaders also formed an Enterprise Grid Alliance, a consortium founded by Oracle, Optena, HP, Sun, and others to define standards and interfaces required to encourage Grid computing for enterprise applications.
Fast forward to today, and the machines kids get to play with — the iPads and iPod Touches — don't actively encouraging that sort of computing.
And a "smart working network", building on the principles of cloud computing, encourages businesses to share their redundant space and even telepresence facilities to improve efficiencies.
The increasing failure rate in High Performance Computing encourages the investigation of fault tolerance mechanisms to guarantee the execution of an application in spite of node faults.
"With more people working from home and schools encouraging greater use of IT the demand for home computing equipment is bigger than ever.
Macvean said the free systems would encourage children to explore computing science in ways that might not otherwise be possible.
Transistor shrinkage over the years has left spare room on the chip to add specialised processing units for handling such services as graphics, video and cryptography.As it is, the popularity of mobile communications and computing has encouraged semiconductor firms to embed as many features as possible in their processors.
Meanwhile, Python expanded in scientific computing, which encouraged the creation of a wide range of open-source libraries that have benefited from years of R&D.
Many of the women I talked to said this was the first time they had met others like themselves, and they felt really encouraged to continue in computing and to make a difference.
