I thought this was a very thought provoking video, and there are two things immediate thoughts I had.
The first is the notion of going from the old Mainframe-Terminal approach of computers to fully functional laptops and desktops we see today. While today's computers have far greater capability then the mainframes of old, I fear we are slowly steering back towards a "mainframe controlled" approach. The mainframe could be represented by the giant web companies such as Google or Facebook, whereas the terminals are your everyday computers. Without Facebook or Google arguably our computers (the terminals) would lose a lot of use. By having sites such as Facebook run on centralized servers where Facebook is literally in control of everything you do and enter on the site, the user loses control. Things like Google Docs are almost identical in concept to mainframe/terminal word processing applications that would have been around long ago. If Google, Facebook or your mainframe goes down or is compromised your are SOL.
Finally, last semester I took a computer science class on Computer Networks. That class went into very high level detail on how some of the technical concepts from the video (TCP/IP etc) actually are implemented.
All I can say is I'm glad to be done with that technical stuff and looking at more of the cultural implications, it's much less boring!
No comments:
Post a Comment