Re: First Impressions on Using Alphora's Dataphor

"Christopher Browne" <cbbrowne_at_acm.org> wrote in message news:2pkepaFls80gU1_at_uni-berlin.de...

> Actually, this could be considered support the notion that there has
> been practically NO genuine innovation since the early 1970s.
>
> Which would support the further thought that it would be a sensible
> idea to ignore _all_ of the technologies created more recently than
> (say) 1975, and for would-be innovators to look at the things created
> between 1965 and 1975 for inspiration to see if things that failed
> then due to computers not being powerful enough could be reclaimed
> now.
>
> I'm not _entirely_ serious, although I definitely don't think there
> has been anything usefully new in either OSes or DBMSes since at best
> the '80s.
>
I think that's a little too "retro", even for me.

When I finally bought a computer of my own, in 1983... Spreadsheets were an innovation for me, although VISICALC was already many years old.
And TURBO PASCAL was a great leap forward in simplicity, power, and, yes price.
I liked TP so much that I started writing Pascal programs at home, and then uploading them to the "real computers" at work.

But I digress. In keeping of my theme of "evolution, not revolution", I'm going to say that progress has been steady. The only thing I lament is all the stuff that gets invented, debugged, matured, and then forgotten. Then, some time later someone from a later generation, "invents it" all over again.

more later..

> - Linux is a Unix derivative, and therefore not genuinely
> new;
>
> - Windows isn't particularly useful, so being new isn't helpful ;-);
>
> - XML is merely a rehashing of S-exprs, which date back to the '60s;
>
> - Java and C# are merely additional iterations in the retreads of BCPL
> and Algol :-)
>
> - Most of the innovation in "relational stuff" ended when Stonebraker
> left academia.
>
> You could do far worse than to rummage around the papers of the '70s
> to look for mine them for things people have forgotten... Nobody in
> IT 'management' would be likely to notice that you were creating
> 'retreads' of old technologies.
> --
> "cbbrowne","_at_","acm.org"
> http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/multics.html
> If a logical expression is hard to understand, try transforming it.
Received on Wed Sep 01 2004 - 01:38:00 CEST