Thank heavens for the silicon chip: A BRIEF history of data

Re: True dat

I think Turing might have beaten you to that realisation by about eight decades :-)

Re: True dat

Computing can be reduced to a number of formalisms. Saying "it's all about data" is no more insightful than saying "it's all arithmetic" or "it's all function construction and application" or "it's all compression" or "it's all moving heat around".

In fact, from that set, there are probably more interesting insights to be derived from, say, "it's all compression" than from "it's all data". In particular the rather dubious analogy between tally sticks and writing on the one hand, and structured and unstructured data on the other, that Whitehorn draws, while a decent bit of parlor discourse, seems rather too shallow to illuminate anything significant.

And of course the history of forms of data-keeping was hilariously abbreviated, when not outright wrong, but what can you expect from this sort of article?

Re: sorry

You are obviously of low intelligence then, my brain corrects the spelling mistakes and allows me to read it with ease

Re: So the monkey riot at the start of "2001" was caused by?

Try it on a machine today with a fresh install of Windows 7 SP1.

I think the laptop I re-loaded (thank-you CryptoWall!!!) yesterday downloaded close to 1GB of updates and took all day to complete with numerous reboots.

Those example do manipulate data as if you look at them at the assembler level as those instructions do contain data (location for jumps if nothing else). I guess it depends on your definition of both computer application and data.

Actually, the real riposte is that there are some computer applications that don't manipulate very much data, and computing rather than data manipulation is the most important thing that they're doing.

The earliest computers - excluding Colossus from consideration - were thought of basically as programmable scientific calculators, and that's how they were used. Some programs would take long lists of numbers as input (and thus they clearly did deal in data to a significant extent) - and others wouldn't.

But in business applications, data was relevant before there were computers - companies kept boxes of punched cards for transactions and for customers. And dealing with data was painful before random-access storage (the disk drive) came along... and once it became available, then it made sense to start thinking of how to make better use of its capabilities. And then various early types of database (hierarchical, Codasyl) came along before the relational database was invented.

Instructions are data. They're data that the processing units use to decide what actions to take.

By definition, computation involves manipulating data. As soon as you have a switch, you have data.

Re: Perhaps interesting

Print as one page? Try the mobile site.

Re: A Bit More History

As always, there are long chains of ideas and innovations in this domain that lead to the present. Joanne Yates' highly readable study of business communications, Control through Communication, describes the major innovations in business DP in the US during the nineteenth century, for example. The transitions from pigeonhole desks to chapbooks to flat filing to vertical filing were hugely important, as were those from manual copying to spirit duplicators to carbon paper to xerography; and those from quills to fountain pens to typewriters. (And, of course, none of these transitions were abrupt; we still have spirit duplicators and mechanical pens, etc.)

Foucault's The Order of Things, though controversial, documents many of the epistemic changes in Early Modern and Modern Europe regarding the nature, manipulation, and organization of information. There are numerous competing views, of course.

If memory serves, the first episode of James Burke's Connections (and first chapter of the follow-on book) concerns the invention of the modern digital computer, hitting such now-well-known highlights as Jacquard's loom and player pianos. While it doesn't have the depth expected of an academic treatment, it's good fun and enlightening if you aren't familiar with all the bits he discusses.

And so on. I have shelves' worth of books that touch on the subject, and it's not one of my research areas. Well-trodden ground.

Yes. Visi-Calc was the original "killer app" which got PCs (mainly the Apple ][) into small business.

For importance in legitimating PC use in business, its only real competitor is probably the IBM PC, which drove PC adoption by larger businesses thanks mostly to the IBM name, and secondly to its ability to replace 3270 terminals on management desks with a more-functional device (because it could both be a 3270 and run spreadsheet and word-processing applications).

It's not clear that many people actually used PCs as 3270s (until much later when TCP/IP stacks and TN3270 clients became common), particularly since third-party hardware was required until the 3270PC came out, but it was one of the marketing points IBM emphasized when selling them to large businesses. It made the IBM PC seem "serious": you could use it to run your mainframe-based management apps.