An IT Blast from The Past - 1996

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A couple of weeks ago Jared Newman’s sister stumbled upon a paper from her high school years, dating back 15 years to 1996, explaining the pro’s and con’s of the Internet.

The list of advantages is still very much relevant and the basic prediction of “Much, much more, and it will only increase in time to come” proved to be very much correct and we can quite confidently say, 15 years later, that still there is much more to come.

The disadvantages this page lists are somewhat arguable.

First, in most places internet connection is quite reliable. The maturity and reliability of the internet is what enabled cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service to become more txhan just a hype.

The fact that “People can post whatever they want” made the social web to be the success it is now. The issues of too much free speech and the exposure to unsolicited problematic content are still dangerous, especially among kids and teenagers.

As far as Organization goes, well this paper was written one year before google.com was registered, a point from which the vast content on the web became much more ordered, searchable, and therefore more organized.

Speed is seldom a problem these days, where in most places an HD movie can be downloaded in a rate greater than its view time.

Security is indeed a sensitive matter and it is very much a factor that both individuals and corporations need to put their minds into before exposing their lives (e.g. facebook) or their valuable data (e.g. SaaS).

Changed Links is not a matter we trouble ourselves with too much as today we are having better content management tools and the more reliance of the search engines.

Addiction is still a problem. We definitely spend too much time in the virtual world.

And last but not least is the true pitfall of the internet and the age of IT we are in and that is the Changing Technology. The technologies we need to deal with today differ greatly from those we dealt with 5 years ago, let alone 15 years ago. Most likely the technologies we align ourselves with today will not be relevant 5 or even 2 years from today.

This is true except for one technology: The Magic Software technology. From its inception until today and for future to come, the Magic Software platform kept the development paradigm completely detached from the underlying technologies by maintaining the application design in the form of meta-data and not of explicit code. Only Magic Software platform based applications were able to leap over each technology generation while keeping the majority of the investment put in past designs and keep them relevant in the next technology generation.

Only within the impressive community of Magic Software customers you can find applications that were developed even before 1996, over DOS, to run today as .NET applications running on Windows 7 and as Mobile applications running today on Blackberry devices and soon on Andiod and iPhone.
These Magic Applications will surely manage to leap over any new technology challenge that the IT industry will be facing, without resorting to dramatic code rewrite.

If you are not a Magician (a Magic based developer) I am sure had you to face this disadvantage and great challenge of becoming familiar with many new technologies along the way.

The proud Magicians who developed their applications already 15 or 20 years ago are the only type of developers who can attest to be able to keep the skill-set they acquired back then to be relevant today. And without too much re-training they have transformed from DOS application developers to Mobile application developers.

It is absolutely remarkable to see how the Magic Software concept triumphed over so many changes and it is today much more relevant than ever before.

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