Published:
July 05 2010, 01:43 PM
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by
Reg Harbeck
Perhaps one of the clearest manifestations of our creative instinct is humanity's desire to create viable objects and systems that have an existence entirely distinct from their creators.
Whether you're talking tools, statues, buildings or businesses, we seem to like the idea that what we have produced has an existence so separate from us that it will continue on after we're gone.
Perhaps that's one reason why, when we produce such a spectacular invention as the computer, we tend to immediately think of it as somehow other, not just from ourselves, but from nature as well.
I think this is an interesting and practical way of approaching our inventions. Indeed, being able to "let go" has value from the perspective of our own viability beyond that of our inventions as well.
However, there's another side to this coin that we perhaps don't pay as much attention to: the objects and systems that we invent are, in their very essence, human.
Let's look at the computer as an example. The idea for a computational machine arose a long time before the first working prototype made its way into the world of business. In some ways, it could be seen as a logical next step from the industrial revolution: automate the physical work that people did, then begin to automate the clerical work as well.
And what clerical job description became the first one targeted for replacement by this innovation? Computer, of course.
Yes, as you probably already knew, "Computer" was actually a job title, and many hard-working people were employed doing continuous calculations before their role, and job title, was taken over by an electronic innovation.
It would be simplistically easy to assume that, once this first computing device got its foot in the door, its successors began to diverge into a completely separate existence that was all logic and not at all human, except maybe as a role model for Spock wanna-be's.
In fact, if we look at what business dollars were paying for, and businesses were demanding (often through user groups, including the first computer user group: SHARE), it always came back to their business requirements, which were shaped by the needs, wants, requirements and goals of... humans.
So, the computer (and particularly the business computer) was born and grew up in the context of business and humanity.
However, if there's one thing we can learn from history (other than the fact that we never seem to learn from history, of course), it's that plans too far in advance tend to not work out because the unforeseen and unforeseeable quickly occlude most of what we can project with our best predictive abilities. My favorite quotation about this comes from General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who famously said, "In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."
So, while excellent ground work was laid for making business computing a viable, reliable reality, and while the announcement of the System/360 did indeed establish a foundation that continues to this day to support the most important business computing activities in the world, there were some things that couldn't have been easily foreseen back then, and many of them have to do with our humanity.
Which brings us to 2010. Computing (and networking) technology have grown and flourished, twisted and morphed in response to consumer and business demands and emergent and consequent technological breakthroughs, constantly re-adapting to humanity's requirements and interests. Yet one of our oldest and deepest requirements has always been for something stable, functional and trustworthy, and so we have continued to rely on the mainframe in the midst of all these other innovations.
And, as a result, while it continues to be ever-more reliable, the mainframe too has taken on the best of all these technical, human-centric adaptations, and is even taking on a new generation of humans to manage it.
Which brings me to my conclusion: with all of its history, mandates, innovation, quality, adaptations and optimizations, today's mainframe computer - particularly with key enablers for a new generation such as CA MSM and CA Mainframe Chorus - is one of the most human inventions yet.
Which is why I'd call it the Human Computer.