ABSTRACT
The future of computing in architectural practice is difficult to predict; ‘cultural lag’ determines that people and their ways of working tend to change more slowly than developments in information technology. It is also difficult to guess which technical developments will be adopted, as this depends on a large number of factors including chance, timeliness and market forces. It is not always the most attractive, clever or innovative systems that succeed to become the de facto standards for however short a time. The floppy disk for example, in spite of its comparatively small storage capacity, continued to be used for at least ten years and has only recently been challenged by devices with up to a hundred times the capacity.
