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 Caught Smack Dab In The Middle |
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By Fritz Nelson
I am forever bound to be in the middle. I am a middle child, for instance, and I am neither a baby boomer nor part of Generation X, neither Cadillac nor minivan. What's worse, my birth into enterprise network technology came post-mainframe, but pre-Ethernet switching--somewhere around the sizzling times of downsizing. I am without history, the middle child of an information age whose time came and went more quickly than a Kenneth Starr investigation. I long to say: "I'll never forget the time..." but I can never remember how the last part goes. Instead, I live vicariously through the Network Computing staff.
"My first job at CAE was helping toss the key punch and card reader hardware that used to be attached to a Harris 800. The rest of my summer was spent cutting floor tiles for the installation of a Data General MV10000 and IBM 4341. Any computer you can't sit on isn't really a computer at all. It was relatively easy to nap on the IBM system console. It was about 4 feet tall, 8 feet long and 3 feet wide. It was warm, and the humming in the system room was sleep-inducing. If one had a couple beers at lunch... not that one would ever do that." Even some of the younger CAE staff have a sense of history--it seems to be passed down with the propensity to drink beer. They joke about PDP-11s as if they'd been rocked to sleep in their cradles to the whir of the processor. To watch our young techno logy editor, Tony Frey, discuss and debate application development and middleware issues with Barry Nance, who has been in the computer industry for 30 years, is to have your eyes deceive you. Yet this is by design. Our technology editors come from enterprise network environments like yours. We've formed lab partnerships with corporations and universities to keep ourselves immersed in the real world. Nancy Cox, for example, tested Dr Solomon Anti-Virus (page 50) in our lab at a large corporation in central Florida. Rob Kohlhepp beta-tested Apple Mac OS 8.1 and Thursby's DAVE 2.0 (pages 44 and 48) at the University of Wisconsin. (We've been worried about Rob ever since he responded to a party invitation like this: "Can we go in your Cadillac? Can we change lanes without signaling, drink stool softeners and wear the waist of our pants around our chest?" I realize that by repeating things like this, I'm setting Wisconsin back 20 years, but, then, what's another 20?) Our freelance product testers even come from these environments. Chris Lankford, a CAE staff member, tested 10/100-Mbps switches (page 101). Jim Stromski, part of the IT staff at Syracuse University, where we house another lab site, tested system console switches for this issue (page 112). With this approach, we think we can better understand your decision-making. "I'll never forget the time" Bruce Robertson's partnership with an oil company in Texas led us to cover middleware more than three years ago. Bruce, who writes our In The Middle column on application "Webification" (page 123), understood that networking's not the goal, application delivery is. The infrastructures we build are the plumbing and appliances. We sit in the middle, hidden but not forgotten; our networks help determine and influence business application decisions. I, too, have my role. I am a bridge between past and future. Tomorrow, I may tune in to see that Bill Dance has a Java-enabled depth finder, or that Kenneth Starr is starting to subpoena chat room records. I may wake up to find that the network really has become an appliance, and I may fall back to sleep in the comfort of virtual whirring...or maybe just the haze of one too many beers at lunch. Fritz Nelson, fnelson@nwc.com |
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by Fritz Nelson The Sport of Trash Talking Un-con-ventional, That's What You Are The Real-World Road We've Taken Protocols On The Old-Boy Network No Monkey Business In The Real World |
Although Art Wittmann has to eat a few of his words in this issue's
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