[ih] internet-history Digest, Vol 37, Issue 6

[John Day]

Completely agreed.  And along the way re-inventing stuff.  I have 
always contend that CS is the only field in which Ontogeny really 
does Recapitulate Phylogeny!  ;-)  With mainframes, minis and micros 
we went through all the same things yet again.  In networking, it was 
terminal/host, client/server, network computer and now cloud 
computing.

You ask, what is there left to worry about?

Getting it right.  What is the structure and the solution the problem 
is telling is what we should be doing, i.e. we can get back to 
understanding the science of computer science.

I know that there are a lot of people saying that CS isn't a science. 
They simply lack the imagination and vision.  It was a science.  It 
has become a craft.  It will be a lot of hard unpleasant work, but it 
needs to reclaim its science.  Or as I like to characterize it,

maximizing the invariances and minimizing the discontinuities.

At 9:27 -0600 2009/11/09, Larry Sheldon wrote:
>[This may be off-topic and unwelcome--please so indicate by not 
>responding to it in any way.  I have been involved with computers 
>for a long time, but not involved in network development in the 
>sense the term is used here.]
>
>John Day wrote:
>
>>                                         In the space of just a few years
>>the overhead issue had become a non-issue.
>
>
>I have long been interested in how often this syndrome has occurred 
>(worrying about things that we spent a lot of time and other 
>resources that became non-issues before we solved them).
>
>When I started, things had to fit in 16,000 characters (32,000 if 
>you were very wealthy, 64,000 rumored but never seen) of memory 
>(14XX's), then 10,000 decimal words (707X's).
>
>We went to extraordinary lengths to reduce the number of characters 
>written to (256BPI, 7-track) tapes (some of the bizarre stuff takes 
>a while to explain so I'll spare you).
>
>Then we went to disks and drums where the space issue also involved 
>the dreaded read-before-writes, and minimization of head movement 
>and latency (hard to do in COBOL).
>
>Now we have memory-by-the-acre, disc-by-the-cubic-mile, and disk 
>speeds, high-speed cache, and solid-state-discs of huge size that 
>have eliminated all those concerns (and we use programming language 
>that makes them hard to see and impossible to do anything about).
>
>What is there left to worry about?
>
>Besides batteries that spontaneously combust in one of our several 
>computes in our pockets.
>
>--
>Requiescas in pace o email              Two identifying characteristics
>                                              of System Administrators:
>Ex turpi causa non oritur actio        Infallibility, and the ability to
>                                              learn from their mistakes.
>Eppure si rinfresca
>
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