It Used To Be Double Dutch But, Now, It’s Geek Speak

Posted byPaola Nadeau on Dec 2020 in Computer and internet | 0 comments

I had my introduction to computers around the time that punch cards were being replaced with black plastic squares called 8 inch floppy disks. Today, I often feel chained to my computer but the things still puzzle me. I did finally realize that the 8 inch square was only the plastic cover for the circular disk inside – hence the name made sense after all. But, I never could get my head around why the 100 year old system of numbering for our company’s products could not be used to identify them in the new company main frame computer (even today, I am unsure why the computer was referred to as the main frame).

It Got Worse As It Got Better

I learnt how to live with the results of the company’s” computerization” in the form of unwieldy concertinas of wide folded paper but, it was not until the boss invested in some, “new fangled” personal computers that I was allowed to get in front of one of these mystery machines and use it to produce something for myself. I learned to appreciate the sense of humor in something that tells you “to shut down – click start”; but it did seem somewhat dumb to tell me “no keyboard detected – push any key to continue”. I did get my head around the hardware : software divide and could follow the fact that everything I did was controlled by software programs running on the hardware on my desk. But, how those programs worked after our newly hired IT Manager had installed them on something called a server was beyond me.

I am preparing this article on a laptop and, to this day, I have no idea how my word processing program puts the letters up on the screen and checks that they are correct.

And Then, I Was Totally Lost

The boss starting talking about how we should get into open source software and put our beloved data up on a cloud using something called Apache Hadoop. I told him that I had no idea what he was talking about. I suspect he didn’t know either; since he then told me to check it out on the Hadoop Mailing List Archives and all I have found out is that Hadoop was the name of the developer’s kid’s toy elephant.