I had this buzzing around in my head after taking the time to re-read the blog / posting by Tricia Liebert concerning COBOL. (see: [ http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-news/?p=2068 ] and the discussions here: [ https://www.techrepublic.com.com/5206-12844-0.html?forumID=102&threadID=254987&start=0 ] ).
After reading all the posts in the Discussions, I realized there is one underlying theme, -Data. What COBAL did / does very well is manage massive amounts of Data. Which is why it is still in use in Financial markets, Major Banks, Logistics, and many more areas of the business world. This was well pointed out in the discussions, so I’m not going to re-hash that. But what was not really addressed (properly so, as it was not the theme of the discussion) was that there is this giant monster of a problem that is driving the need for such programs / languages as COBAL. Data.!. Never in the history have we as cognitive beings collected, stored, or even found the need for so much Data. Why? Are we collective pack-rats? That would be a discussion for a psycho— (whatever) forum and not a techie one. The problem we have is what to do with all this Data we seem to accumulating. (We’ll leave out the socio-political issues here as well.) Will there come a day when there is such an unmanageable amount of Data that we can only abandon it all, as we do a giant Garbage heap, and move. Will having so much Data around lesson the importance of any of it? We already have the Information Overload, when do we get to Stored Data overload as well? And the flow is not abating either. With (many) Government Bodys either actively collecting, or causing the retention of even more Data by means of (over?) regulation. There are (valid) concerns being voiced in the realm of our personal privacy in such collections of Data, but not of the problem of the Data monster itself.
In the past, it was a practice after a pre-determined period of time that Data used to be purged, thrown away. (ie: Destroy by:__ dates, that were a part of the archiving process)
What now? Will there someday be a National Data Dump Day? An International Data Dump Day. I can see the entire power grid groaning under the massive load of millions of whole Data Centers Dropping their collective load. Maybe we could call it a Holiday too. Or we could, I guess just wallow in the Great Data Swamp. -d
