Multidimensional scaling: An analysis of 1980–1990 computers

Computer performance is an important issue for engineering and economic aspects of computer usage, planning, design and research. The Co-plot methodology graphically relates attributes, observations and interrelations between attributes, thus enabling the simultaneous study of all the observations and variables of a given data set. An analysis of performance attributes of computers from the 1980s (1981–1991) was carried out according to the Co-plot methodology. The analysis shows that during this decade, computer performance became more dependent on IO rate, cache size and multiprocessing, and less dependent on memory-size and IO addressing capabilities. At the same time, the high correlation between CPU speed and performance was maintained.