Weekly Theme: Week of June 9 - 15, 2013

The Theme for this Week is Domestication.  When I looked on Google for insight, I got (from Wikipedia), "domestication theory".  In a nutshell, this means that we take new technology and then "tame" it for "everyday use".  Take smartphones, for example.  I now have, in my pocket, hardware (Samsung T-Mobile Sidekick), which runs the Linux Kernel, supporting Google Android.  In other words, I could (but don't) run software on this phone[1] that makes it into a full-featured Linux Server, such as would have been found in Universities, taking entire rooms, back in the 1980's!  But look at how "tame" smartphones are, these days.

I'm going to take this even one step farther.  My first computer job was in August, 1974, at Fireman's Fund Insurance in San Francisco, CA.  Their computer systems (IBM 360/370 technology) took up an entire floor of a building that took up a city block.  But guess what?  Running Hercules as an emulator[2], I can run MVS 3.8j, which was it's current operating system, up to the early 1980's.

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[1]  As one example, I found kWS, web server software, on Google's Android "Store".  If you made your phone into a "WiFi Hotspot", it has the capability to put a web page onto any device that connected.

[2] An Emulator allows one computer to run software, which "emulates" the hardware of another computer.

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Gee!  This is a bit more complex than most of the entries in this BLOG.  Don't expect that every day!  :-)

Best regards,

Kenneth Parker, Seattle, WA