Ars Technica has a good retrospective on HyperCard, a program I still remember fondly. (In fact, I still have my copy of HyperTalk 2.2: The Book in a bookshelf at home.) I wrote a JCL tutorial in HyperCard; UT developers who’ve taken my JCL class have seen some of the content that was in it.

When Tim Berners-Lee’s innovation finally became popular in the mid-1990s, HyperCard had already prepared a generation of developers who knew what Netscape was for.

Yep.

As a bit of follow-up to yesterday’s post, IBM started shipping magnetic disk about four years after their tape. Jeffrey McGuire sent me the link to this video, 60 Years Ago: IBM Invents the Hard Drive.

(One impression from this video: people talk about corporations controlling things now, but it feels like it was worse in the 1950’s. Of course, IBM’s corporate culture under Watson Sr. was always a bit creepy.)

Apparently IBM released their first magnetic tape storage for computers 60 years ago: graphic

(via Mainframe Belgium)

Higher Education and the Perfect Data Storm

Some quotes:

In education, data always arrives too late, like Inspector Clouseau, blundering into a scene, oblivious to what’s really going on or who the villain is.  The kind of information data yields is retrospective, not predictive.  Correlation, as we know, is not causation.  To this, I would add mathematization is not explanation. I just learned “mathematization” is among the “bottom 20% of lookups” in the online Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary; what exactly does this tell me?

…

Even analyzed data is haunted by forging, fudging, trimming, and cooking, along with confirmation bias and egocentric thinking.

…

I am going to make a radical suggestion about data and higher education:  colleges and universities will be better served if they avoid kneeling at the altar of data and instead fill key positions with people driven by intuition, experience, values, conviction, and principle.  A good place to start would be looking for leadership guided by a transcendent educational narrative.

An article at the Register yesterday ranked buzzwords’ credibility from -1.0 (not at all credible) to +1.0 (credible). “Data-driven” was rated -0.76.