Computer report I: Hard-soft tradeoffs: Large-scale integrated gates and read-only memories are displacing software from many of its traditional roles

From the system cost viewpoint, hardware and software have exchanged roles during the past two decades. In the early '60s, hardware used to account for well over 50 percent of system costs. Today, the hardware portion is substantially below 50 percent and that portion is declining more rapidly today than in the past.