Devil's Advocate: Medieval historians bite back

Last week Martin Brampton's column elicited all manner of responses. Here he continues to question how the old affects the new in technology.

Last week's discussion of education and training brought challenging comments from readers. It was particularly gratifying to hear from one of the medieval historians so unfairly maligned by our Education Minister. Issues are rarely as simple as they appear at first sight.

What particularly surprised me was that our medieval historian was not arguing for the subject in terms of its intrinsic value. Instead, while pointing to the fascination of the subject, the suggestion was that medieval history is a growth industry. It is good to be reminded that we, in the UK, benefit from having a relatively long and unbroken history going back a thousand years.

For that matter, we have a relatively long and unbroken history of IT achievement - although the present is in some ways disappointing compared with the past. We can point with pride to the achievements of Alan Turing, who provided an impressive underpinning for a theoretical understanding of computation. Indeed, he did so when there were hardly any computers.

Reader comments were generally couched in terms of regret for lost values of the past. A dispassionate view of the development of computing ideas might well support this view. Following Alan Turing, there was a ferment of ideas as people worked to gain an understanding of computational techniques. Somehow, though, the momentum did not last long.

An extraordinarily powerful set of ideas was formulated at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) in the late 1960s. Around the same time, pretty much all the fundamental principles of operating systems were explored at Bell Labs as the Unix system came into being. By no means all of the ideas were brand new but they were formulated in powerful ways that have had lasting impact.

PARC was where the notion of the graphical user interface - GUI - took shape and where object orientation became a developed idea. Neither Apple nor Microsoft are the real innovators, even though they both deserve credit for taking design principles from theory to commercial implementation.

Nostalgia gains support from the relative absence of fundamentally new thinking in recent decades. Current novelties include web services and development schemes such as Java and C#. Yet web services is an implementation of lightweight remote objects and 'new' programming languages depend on the ancient, by IT standards, concept of a virtual machine. Both of these ideas were extensively explored back in the 1960s.

Maybe XML is something new? Well, no, it is characteristic of much modern development. The history of mark-up languages is a long one, again going back at least to the 1960s. What is new is that hardware advances have made it possible to do things once regarded as having too high an overhead. Maybe we are too busy with implementations to worry about anything completely new.

A US-based reader remarks despondently that letting corporates into schools has had a disastrous effect on nutrition. Perhaps we might also consider that the innovations at PARC and Bell Labs depended on old-fashioned corporations who carried on research without any immediate goal. In fact, neither organisation benefited significantly from its creations.

That brings us to the reader who invoked Machiavelli. We seem now to be less honest than Niccolo Machiavelli, who openly advised how to secure power and exercise it. Today, public talk is about all kinds of high principle, while action is frequently driven by Machiavellian considerations. This is true both in politics and business, and nowhere more than in IT. Why, I wonder, is that?