Sifting Through Billions and Billions of Bytes

“Certainly, life expectancies were about half of modern
realities and labor was largely manual and not intellectual, but
the huge disparity likely has more to do with the sheer rapidity of
technological change of the last eighty years. Think about it.
Anesthesia is less than one hundred years old (ouch). Television is
a sexagenarian. The personal computer is approaching mid-life
crisis. And the Internet has been publicly available for two
decades. My parents’ generation has seen the introduction of
all those inventions, and my children take all those advances for
granted. Dick Tracy’s once futuristic gadgets have nothing on
a smart phone.

“In general, people are now constantly inundated with
information. In fact, many livelihoods depend on keeping apace even
as the pace quickens. Developing software is certainly among them:
it is solely intellectual; it advances relentlessly; and it must be
practiced diligently.”

Complete
Story