This article, a definite break from other papers, focused almost exclusively on hardware layouts. The Tandem system, with it's complete backups of everything would allow for good parallel processing, because each CPU and memory unit can do their own processing. Of course, with the overhead concerned with moving the data and processing around this would not be an efficient system.
All of this seems to combine into the eventual decline of the system. As the author indicates towards the end of the paper, the biggest downfall of the system seems to be its inability to cope with the change to 32bit systems, and the cost of double (or more) hardware also seems to have put a dent into their ability to last. The fact that the performance was already below average didn't help the system to stay active as time pressed on.
I find it pretty ironic that this was used in many ATMs at one point, yet the author gleefully points out that they saw many opportunities to successfully attack a Tandem system's processes and files during the creation of the system itself. I'm assuming they made sure the system was secure once it was in place, but it still doesn't help to think about how wrong it all could have gone.
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