|||
the COBOLworx Newsletter substack is up. Free now and likely forever. Mostly a better place than a blog any more.
Considering another, for me, not necessarily free. A useful article while I consider the options.
Just grinding through current programming … OOOPS … software development chatter and asked the search engine about “business data processing.” It turns out to mean everything and the descriptions make sure to through in the kitchen sink (real-time processing and multiprocessing for example) which doesn’t help.
In 1925, Data Processing (DP) was about business and administrative data. Computing was about scientific data. COBOL. FORTRAN. And computer science wasn’t yet but its seeds were about neither DP/COBOL nor Computing/FORTRAN but about the seemingly infinite symbolic manipulation possible using the Turing/Von Neumann stored program electronic “Computers” (already then an ambiguous term). Using Edsger Dijkstra’s ALGOL as as good a starting point as any for the “General Purpose” thread we can now see three base approaches. COBOL, FORTRAN, ALGOL. Domain specific, domain specific, and general purpose.
The 1970s added communications (email, bulleting boards/news. The 1980s added Hobby (general or no purpose at all), and then Advertising. The Web is a mish-mash of online-transaction processing (data collection and query response), advertising medium, communications medium, and surveillance technology.
So what do we call it? How do we talk about it? Confusion reigns.