history of computing 3702

Your cross-hyperlinked archives of postings are an excellent example of the sponginess that is part of how things should be described.

Here I use "sponginess" in the "twisty little pbuttages all alike" sense: everything is potentially connected with just about everything else. Such that if you tried to make a cave system out of all the relevant stuff that the resulting rock would be more like a sponge, in that there are so many potential cross-connects.

Maybe "sponginess" in the neurological sense too: lots and lots of surface area, lots of folds and convolutions for cross-connects.

It's pretty sad to see someone try to translate something as rich as the computer industry for the past half-century into a single relational database. No matter how many tables or stored triggers or indexed keys you make you're going to miss all the important cross connections between people, companies, technologies, careers ("person" to "career" is definitely a "many to many" mapping!) Hyperlinks come the closest.

XML schema suffer from a similar fate as SQL databases. Yeah, hypertext is sort of a subset of XML but not really in terms of richness because hypertext has a thinking reader reading actual text and relations (and not simply a web of links). I'm thinking back to a lot of the innovative hypercard-type stuff smart people were doing back in the 1980's.

Clearly in making a post you can and do cross-reference back to previous posts, but it would be remarkable (in a Philip K privates inspired moment) to figure out how to forward-reference to coming but not yet written posts.

Tim.