intrust

After the 1890 census, things have only gotten better for the IT industry. Certainly machines are more powerful, ridiculously faster, and apparently one can now put megabytes of data on the head of a pin. I have already pointed out under the four Cs of the Great Commonwealth what I believe to be the most significant aspects of the sector today, commonality, commoditization, communality and completeness, and now I would like say something about the evolution of dW3.

In the industry it is customary to speak of layers¹ and the metaphor often used in explaining these layers is as follows: There is a train track and any train that observes the wheelbase of the track can travel on it. The track need know nothing about the train, the train need only trust that the track will hold. On any flatcar of the train one can place a container. The container must fit on the flatcar of course, but need not know more about the flatcar than whether it will hold. The container has no business with the train track at all. The container can take any sort of good that fits into the limits of its inner dimensions. The goods have no business with the flatcar, or the train track.

So here we have 4 independent entities, track, car, container and goods, and they are dependent only upon their closest neighbour in the stack of layers. The system is flexible and congenial to the interchangeability of elements. An absurd counter-example would be if all goods had to be adapted to transport themselves directly on the track itself. If somebody made some improvements in the track, then all the goods would have to be redesigned to still use it.

Observe that the individual cars of a train are not considered separate layers, but members of the same horizontal layer. They must all meet the requirements of the track and provide uniformly for the containers.

This metaphor when applied to computing comes out something like this: The computing machinery is the track, the flatcar is the operating system, the container is the computer program and the goods are dW3.

My counter-example is roughly what Hollerith had to deal with. The computer, the operating system and the program,², were all the track, and the W3 goods had to deal with them as such. The entire arrangement was task-specific, though Hollerith could somewhat adjust the task by getting out some pliers and a screwdriver.

I need not, I’m sure, tell you that through the years the layered approach to computing gradually replaced hardwired monolithic ways of doing things and gave rise to the commoditization of the industry and the commonalization of dW3. Task-specific requirements were moved to the highest layer of the stack, or in the perspective of another metaphor, to the ends of the computing channels.

// posted by Greg FitzPatrick @ 14:16