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The more you understand, the more you can imagine
In 2022, humanity will explore new horizons. The James Webb space telescope, launched on Christmas Day 2021, has now reached L2, a stable orbital position about 1.5 million kilometres away from Earth. When it is fully working, it will see over 13 billion years into the past, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
If that’s not enough, 2022 is also the year when the Large Hadron Collider reopens, after a multi-year upgrade. The upgrade will allow the LHC to collide particles at higher energies, allowing scientists to explore mysteries within the standard model of physics.
I find these twin explorations, of distant space, and of the fundamental forces of nature, of the very far and the very small, spectacular and inspiring - particularly as they are the work of teams that kept going despite the disruptions of a global pandemic.
What could possibly go wrong?
Are technology people particularly short-sighted? The story of the millennium bug seems to say so. In case you’re not familiar with it (and, although it loomed large in my life, I have to remember that it was over twenty years ago now), the millennium bug was caused by people like me building computer systems which only used two digits to store the year. This seemed like a great way of saving storage and memory in the 1970s and 1980s, but less so when the millennium loomed, and we realised that we were going to need a bigger date. It took millions of people, hours and dollars to fix things so that systems carried on working on 1st January 2000 (and if anyone tries to tell you that the whole thing was a hoax, try asking someone who worked on a millennium project or ran tests that night).
I think that the story of the millennium bug is not a story of short-sightedness: rather it is a reminder that we are still at the early stages of integrating computers into our society. From the perspective of 2022, it seems obvious that systems will run for decades and that they need to be capable of handling all future dates. From the perspective of the 1970s and 1980s, those systems were brand new, and it seemed certain that they would have limited lifespans. Surely nobody would still be running that code twenty years later!
Completing the round trip: from centuries to microseconds
What happens when you press ‘send’ on your mobile banking app? I first posed what I called ‘the round trip question’ a few weeks ago, to illustrate that the people who build technology have a duty to explain. Over those weeks, I’ve explored the nature of computing, of digital communication, of identity, and of the humans who build and use systems. I’ll now attempt to give an end-to-end answer to the question, starting a little bit before you press that button . . .
Mid-19th century: Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage collaborate on the Analytical Engine, intended to be the first programmable, general purpose computer, although it was never finished. Samuel Morse (and others) create a binary code for communication over telegraph wires.
1930s and 1940s: Alan Turing publishes the paper, ‘On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,’ laying the theoretical foundations for digital computers. The theory is put into practice by the creation of Colossuss by Tommy Flowers in Bletchley Park.
Always remember that computer systems have humans at both ends
We should never forget that computing is a human activity that should be used to improve human lives. All computer systems ultimately have humans at both ends: the humans that use the systems, and the humans that build and run those systems.
Unfortunately, the business of building, running and maintaining computer systems can often be so difficult that, in the process of organising programmes, building teams, hiring partners, and writing plans, we forget about the humans. Indeed, for many years, the methods most large companies companies followed to build computer systems seemed designed to squeeze the humanity out of those methods and systems.
If you work for a large enterprise, you have probably been involved in some way in a technology project, even if you have never worked as part of a technology team. You may have been on the receiving end of new software or changed systems, or may have had the opportunity to define requirements or test changes. You may also have heard the term ‘waterfall project’ and picked up the impression that we don’t like waterfall projects any more - even though we still seem to spend huge amounts of time, effort and money executing them.
The servers are virtual, just like the money
In old films, the robbers broke into the bank and stole the money from the vault. In new films, the heroes often break into the computer room to hack the mainframe.
Both of these cliches have some foundation in reality. Bank vaults do contain money - and used to contain a lot more. Mainframe computers are still used in many large organisations, and often run some of their most important systems (although ‘the mainframe’ is no longer as important as films such as those in this video would have you believe).
However, there is also a fundamental flaw in both these ideas: these days, the assets they are trying to gain access to (money and computing systems) are mostly virtual. They do not exist as fixed, physical entities in the world any more.