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Systems work is traditionally divided into research areas such as operating systems, programming languages, networks, etc. Instead we will look at systems as composed of three different mechanisms: communications, computation and storage. Each of these mechanisms impacts decisions made in operating systems, languages etc.

Although no application involves just one of these mechanisms, the earliest applications predominantly tended to use one mechanism. For instance, the early telephone systems essentially only involved communications. In addition to its commercial successes, communications research has produced great advances in switching technologies, data compression and data correction, to name a few areas.

The simplest, and easiest to create database applications are centered primarily on storage issues. They provide efficient ways of storing and accessing information about salaries, population statistics and the books in a library, and particular patient records in a hospital. Finding data records coresponding to combinations of specified properties is difficult and lead a great deal of research in indexing, storage models etc. But by and large these activities are focussed on storage. Relatively small computational and communications was required.

Similarly, many scientific computations rely solely on computation---storage and communications issues are a tiny part of the effort required.