Ironick

Balancing the accumulated knowledge of past generations and the stifling burden of past institutions

In his paean to the great 1962 movie The Manchurian Candidate, David McCoy asks the following:

Are we so focused on tomorrow that we deny today and desecrate the past?  Yeah…  we are.  Not everything worth having was just discovered in the past two weeks, in some garage in Palo Alto, by a few kids in Stanford t-shirts.  Not everything…

Yes, we shed the past -- we must shed it in order to embrace the future. The hard part is deciding which things to shed and which things to keep. Reasonable people disagree. I'm with David on keeping The Manchurian Candidate, so I'll do what I can to get others to watch it, so they'll want to keep it to.

My favorite quotation on the subject is the following:

[The dynamic forces of technology and the conservative forces of ceremony and ritual] oppose each other in dialectical fashion, and what is required for technological creativity is the right blend of accumulated knowledge of past generations and the ability to shed the stifling burden of past institutions.
Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress, p.190

I just love the phrase "shed the stifling burdens of past institutions". The book overall is very good as well.

Update on the origin of the term "middleware".

Someone (named simply "Don") saw my entry on the origin of the term middleware and was nice enough to email me a reference to an even earlier citation from 1968! The term middleware was used in the famous report  of the 1968 NATO Software Engineering Conference:



I'd heard of the famous NATO Software Engineering conf/paper but never seen it. It seems like middleware may be as old as software.

I find it very interesting that in 1968, it was used to refer to software used to adapt generic file system functionality to specific application functionality needs. More generally, I guess you could call middleware "software in the middle of application software and system software."

The Origin (Coining) of the Term "Middleware"

I spent some of my own hard earned cash to scratch an itch I've had for a long time about the origin of the term "Middleware" as well as to test Google Answers. I am delighted with the results:

The Oxford English Dictionary Online (available through personal or institutional subscription) provides, as its first two quotations:

"1970 A. CHANDOR et al. Dict. Computers 254 Middleware, computer manufacturer's software which has been tailored to the particular needs of an installation."

"1972 Accountant 27 Apr. 537/2 A comparatively new term 'middleware' was introduced because, as some systems had become 'uniquely complex', standard operating systems required enhancement or modification; the programs that effected this were called 'middleware' because they came between the operating system and the application programs."

"middleware" OED Online [Oxford University Press] available by subscription at http://dictionary.oed.com

The first citation is to "A Dictionary of Computers", a/k/a "The Penguin Dictionary of Computers", edited by Anthony Chandor et al. "The Penguin Dictionary of Computers (Penguin Reference Books)"

Amazon.co.uk http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/014051127X/qid=1067540389/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_0_2/026-8392499-8130832

"Displaying books where Author is Chandor, Anthony, Title is A Dictionary of Computers" BookFinder.com http://www.bookfinder.com/search/?ac=sl&st=sl&qi=OirDDTdbyRailuduqXthXDoEZVg_1594598467_2:1:3

The second reference appears to be to the London periodical "The Accountant"., which you can find by searching major library catalogs, especially in the UK, for the title "accountant".

What I like about the definitions that Google Answers came up with is that they predate the "network-centric" definitions of Middleware. I'd always assumed that Middleware was coined in the early days of Client/Server to refer to the network-oriented software that linked client and server. But in fact, the Accountant citation clearly defines Middleware as any software between an application and an OS--way before C/S and even before computer networks were prominent. The Dictionary citation emphasizes customization ("tailored") of generic software ("manufacturer's software") to "particular needs". What this suggests to me is that Middleware is software that mediates software, i.e., mediates between a software resource (network) or set of resources (OS) and a software application. This supports my aphorism: "Metadata is data about data; Middleware is software about software."