Platform Independent

W e are in the midst of, or perhaps at the beginning of, the development of a new concept of computing and computers that will significantly affect OR/MS. This development is summarized in the phrase “the network is the computer.” The focus and use is not an individual computer and its resources but a network of computers and resources, indeed, a network of all computers. This concept is closely tied to an evolving view about what a computer is; we now have an exploding number of ubiquitous devices with computa-tional capacity, such as credit cards, cellular phones, and TV set-top boxes. We need to anticipate the impact of millions and then billions of programmable devices that are intercon-nected on a high bandwidth network accessible by millions and then billions of individuals. The sudden and fast mov-ing development of computer networks and the wide dis