after reading

While technology will create the potential for pervasive surveillance, "it will be up to society to determine how we use it," says Rick Rashid a computer scientist and head of Microsoft's research labs. "Society will determine that, not scientists."| nyt by tnews

i don't wonder why some think luddism will raise again. not because of the last sentence, but the first one.

from the other side of the atlantic ...

The ISO thinking in 1978 was in the world of preplanned communication with transaction between companies who are sending purchase orders back and forth, sending shipment information. Modeled, largely, now I think of it, on the mindset that came out of the manufacturing systems that built IDS and built MIACS₁. How do we essentially have corporations cooperate with other corporations doing their business? The EDI90 stuff about how to do communication between businesses is what they mainly focused on. Some say the ISO/SC16 specifications didn’t work well for email. If it had worked well, it would be a happy accident. I don’t think the goal was to make email...I don’t think it was even conceived that email would be important or that browsing would be important.

... part of the vision, certainly in my mind, is that a great deal of what open system interconnections dealing with was messages being sent between programs. The Internet was largely people to people communication. I think that the underlying thought process in the OSI was this was computer process to computer process communication, or people to computer process, so that it had a different requirement on how to behave. | charles w. bachman, once chair of the iso/osi committee

snippets from a long and intense 166pages-interview by thomas haigh for sigmod, babbage institute.

₁ MIACS, an early transaction processing system, was built around Bachman’s new creation: the IDS (Integrated Data Store). IDS is called the first database management system | haigh.

i guess "metcalff" is just a typo, and should mean bob metcalfe, the guy whom harvard told: your dissertation about the arpanet is "not theoretical enough." | metcalfe rfc89 (text/plain, 17 KB)