designers wanted me to feel, as if the computer was a reflection or maybe extension of myself, my digital self. In subsequent trips to the library our cutting edge librarian introduced us to something that she said would be magical and would change the world and how we do things and think about things—the keyword search. She was way ahead of her time. She said that soon we wouldn’t worry about where we put things or how we organized things, we would simply worry about how to name things, because computers would be able to find them, as long as we knew a few words that the computer could search for. These keywords would help you locate anything. Fast forward 25 years and she was right! Everything we do centers on the keyword concept that we now call “tags”. There is so much out there on the Internet that organization is no longer relevant. Search is relevant and we search through tags. In fact, we’ve suddenly become, once again, in love with this all-powerful organizational tool. You’ve all seen the way hashtags have come into vogue. #Hashtags are simply the repackaged version of my elementary school librarian’s keyword searches that she predicted would change the way we live our lives. Hashtags and other tags have infiltrated our social media, been the basis for commercials, influenced late night comedy sketches and controlled the way we find almost everything on the Internet. Mrs. Moore, you were right! But keyword searching repacked into hashtags are not the only piece of technology that has made a comeback. I was born in 1981, so this was before my time, but many of you remember the age of mainframe computing. Ike Whisenand (spelling?) in IT, reminisced about the day in which you would work out all of your programing by hand on a punch card, then you would turn it in where it would go into a queue awaiting its turn to be processed by a mainframe computer that was usually housed somewhere offsite. The large mainframe computer would be the power behind all of the computing that was done for an entire campus of programmers. The mainframe computing model was largely replaced in the ‘80’s as personal computers began to become affordable and take over the market. Nevertheless, today, the mainframe model is back. As some of you may have noticed, around campus, many of YC’s computers no longer have any sort of “computer” attached to them. They all have a mouse, a monitor and a keyboard, but the “tower” the brain of the computer is gone. We have returned to a mainframe metaphor in which our server rooms “push out” as I believe the ITers call it, an instance of a desktop, basically through the cloud, so that we see a desktop displayed on the monitor, but there’s no hard drive there for students to use. To save info, the student must save to the network drive which is like our version of saving work to the cloud. The mainframe structure has returned, where all of the computing is done in the server room and nothing is there for you, locally. This is why the servers can “serve you up” an instance of Windows Seven, or Eight, based on your preference, it’s just a matter of pushing out your preferred OS back in the server room. Ike if you’re reading this, I hope I got that right! Another technology that’s back in style is also changing the face of all that we do, but in reality it’s a new take on an old idea. Apps! They are our mirror in a busy morning, our distractions on an annoying flight and our banking interface when buying a new car. There are literally millions of apps now and they all direct us to a tiny section of walled off Internet that a particular company or app developer wants us in touch with. They limit the Internet to a walled garden of content that is curated and filtered by the app company. One of my favorites is Flipboard, an app that utilizes your preferences to load you up news content that fits your lifestyle and interests, all the while keeping you locked in to an aesthetically pleasing walled off version of the Internet, tightly controlled by Flipboard ltd. Apps seem like new little pieces of C++ Internet heaven, but they are really another new take on an old idea. I remember six years after my first run in with the IBM in my elementary school library, seeing commercials for the Internet. Yes, commercials for the 9x9x25 Challenge
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