UNDERSTANDING COMPUTERS: THE DAWN OF THE XXI CENTURY
The low-level developers fired for the Millennium Bug solution imposed a standardization of the role of programmers and was created the UML, Unified Modeling Language, with which you schematized all the possible issues in simple Use Cases. In the book the authors of the methodology claimed that “it is not the Hero of the software”, curious choice at a time when even the armies abandoned the massive lever and always relied more on elite troops. On the other hand, even in the complicated world of the evaluation of the cost of the software had prevailed for some years a simplistic assessment, which measured the external data, such as databases, the interface, the prints in the Function Point methodology, which then maintained a great approximation and was piloted by the analyst’s sensitivity I argued, ironically, that the button to print the tax form was equivalent to the button with which the US president can unleash thermonuclear war. But the contempt of analysts and managers to work on the software had led to this nonsense. Meanwhile, the prices of the CPU and RAM, as well as the discs had fallen to such an extent that with the same cost of a two-year computer before you could get a thousand times superior properties with potential. Soon in RAM memories overcame the previous theoretical limit and drove to memories of some Gigabytes, while discs, quietly, coming to some Terabytes, that trillions of information. At the same time the Internet was developed, ie the possibility to connect several computers with a computer network to pass information quickly between computers, replacing the hierarchy of client-server distribution of computers, network nodes, with equivalent potential. It began as a military technology, it soon became the daily bread of the users of the computer. He remained the client scheme – server, but the client on the end user computer, needed no special local programs to run programs that were on the server, arose some generalized programs, browsers, which could to show programs and data on the server with a standard interface. So it was possible for each one to have a server and do your own advertising and signal their presence in the world: the site was built. Everyone began to have a site, first for advertising purposes and then direct sales function. The e-commerce, which admirably replaced the old technology of catalogs sent by post, such as the Postal Market and other equivalents, which, of course, have disappeared from the market. Access to the various sites was obtained by a keyword consists of three parts, the first, “www” was common to all, the second was personalized with name chosen by the person or by the company, the third, the suffix, indicating that site category was and nationality, as well as indicating the “domain,” that is, the space purchased on a server that had certain characteristics to ensure the functionality of the site. But at this point the technology was still limited: it was not enough to distribute business cards with the name of your site, it had to be possible to do a search of the sites that deal with a certain subject, are the mowers, cars, or the day’s news . They rose so the search engines, which, with impressive archives, could meet this need in extremely short response times. Pen soon among the Google search engines assumed a dominant position in the market. From a corporate perspective, the client-server choice is honed and you came to the cloud solution, touted with white clouds in a blue sky, with a heavenly vision similar to the propaganda of a famous coffee. In fact, the server was moved from the holding on these “cloud” servers, which could also be in other nations where coexisted spaces purchased from various clients, with significant organizational benefits, the client could do without the hateful category of computer systems analysts that between backups, backups, database management and installations, they held the keys of power in the company. Moreover they could access this service even smaller companies and individuals who had never had IT employees, but you made do by yourself with approximate results. Scalability, ie the possibility to increase at any time the server space bought or leased, was another point of strength of the offer cloud. But there was also the databases revolution. We said in the first chapter that after the processing requirement, the first requirement of the computer world was saving information and data into objects that could be reused at any time. The first solution, in the 70s and 80s of the twentieth century were sequential files, ie each data group that comes up again, the record was stored in a file in which each record was placed after the previous one: The search for the right records involved the reading of all the previous records, therefore with an average time equal to half the reading of all of the archive. Then came the sequential files to directories, faster, but the real revolution of the twentieth century in the field were the relational database, where analysts had five basic rules to design the database, one of which said that the same data must always have the same value, it was not in fact possible that may name is Robert, on the one hand, is Joseph in another part of the database and John in a different part. But the rules also included, in a period of computer space shortage, the same as it had never repeated, so as to save space, except for some database management data, keys, linking together the various archives containing data tables, in a system run by a dedicated language, SQL, with an international coding and some customizations managed by various database vendors. Complicated SQL functions, join, provided an opportunity for the data in tabular format needed for customers and managers, which do not care anything about the database structure, and they wanted the data on your computer in the form legibly and immediate. In the twenty-first century, with the cloud, it also solved this problem, he gave up the placing of non-duplicate data and remained only constraint that a guy named Antony on the one hand not named Luke or John from the other. For compatibility with the previous system, the cloud also supported major relational databases.
