Southern Polytechnic State University
Colloquium Series
Computer Science and Software Engineering
This presentation discusses some of the trade-offs that face people who design computer systems. It describes the consequences of those decisions on subsequent computer system designs, which at times have prevented the complete exploitation of technological advances.
As numeric- and text-processing computers added mixed-object, multimedia processing to their repertoire, limitations imposed by traditional data encoding schemes, such as ASCII and EBCDIC, were exposed. The presentation reviews some data encoding schemes, and their limitations, and discusses some of the encoding methods that have emerged to handle the new media.
Similarly, computer memory representation techniques have imposed limitations on development, particularly on memory size. The presentation discusses some of the techniques used to overcome these limitations. It also describes some of the unforseen impediments to implementing architectures using larger memory address formats.
About the Speaker
Dr. Mary J. Russell received her B.A. degree in mathematics from the University of Tennessee in 1963 and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Emory University in 1967 and 1969. After working at Kansas State University as an assistant professor of mathematics, she spent over fifteen years with IBM Corporation, in systems engineering, systems programming, technical education, software development, and technical support for cross-systems software products. Since leaving the corporate world, Dr. Russell has been a consultant to the computer industry and an adjunct professor of computer science and mathematics at several Texas universities. She spent the 1997–1998 academic year with the University of Maryland European Division, teaching graduate and undergraduate computer science and management information systems courses in England and Germany. She is a member of ACM, SIAM, AMS, and MAA.
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