Computers and Personal Computers in Geophysics

Abstract

From the revolutionary development of Personal Computers since the early seventies also geoscientists have acknowledged the consequences. The organisation of data acquisition, processing and interpretation has changed dramatically since the IBM-PC standard has suceeded on the market of microcomputers. Due to its simple user interface and its nevertheless powerful performance the PC has conquerred the domain of geoscience within only a few years by a decreasing acceptance level and an increasing number of very useful application examples. New computer concepts in industry as well as on universities allow all members of the staff to use not only the local power of a PC but also the fully accessible resources of multi-vendor-networks in the background. A special advantage for universities is the low cost effect of PC hardware and software. At some sites we can find entirely PC-based computer equipement. Sometimes users recognize later on, that their spontaneous restriction on a pure PC environment has been a misjudgement, because the microcomputers were not able to cover all their applications. There are ,indeed, still enough programs which run more efficiently and economically under the conditions of a supermini or a mainframe environment. The decision, wether a program should be implemented rather on a PC than on a mainframe, has become very difficult and depends on a variety of technical details. The paper therefore discusses the most prominent criteria for this chice and a case study with different seismic raytracing programs.