What tomorrow's hardware means for today's risk systems

The shift from vacuum tubes to transistors revolutionised the optimum approach to software design – and banks’ risk technology strategy should be formulated with this lesson in mind, argues David Rowe

Everyone knows the story of the silicon-based transistor and the impact it had on digital computer design – enabling engineers to dispense with the large, expensive vacuum tubes that were the first binary logic device and triggering a decades-long process of miniaturisation. What is often forgotten is the impact this revolution had on programming logic.

In the vacuum tube era, binary logic units