In the beginning (of computing, anyway), there was just data. Computing as a business (and therefore "social"; a lot of academic writing becomes more straightforward if you search-replace) practice precedes computers by a baker's half-century. The first machines were fast tabulators that kept counts and shuttled around data. These machines performed the minimal, simplest tasks that were valuable enough to warrant capital investment and R&D. What made them valuable was scale: big data has been driving innovation since Summerian tablets precipitated the dawn of writing. But what made this scalability possible given the mechanical clockwork quality of then-available technology was the punched-card representation of data. In the beginning, there was just data.
Middleware
Middleware
Middleware
In the beginning (of computing, anyway), there was just data. Computing as a business (and therefore "social"; a lot of academic writing becomes more straightforward if you search-replace) practice precedes computers by a baker's half-century. The first machines were fast tabulators that kept counts and shuttled around data. These machines performed the minimal, simplest tasks that were valuable enough to warrant capital investment and R&D. What made them valuable was scale: big data has been driving innovation since Summerian tablets precipitated the dawn of writing. But what made this scalability possible given the mechanical clockwork quality of then-available technology was the punched-card representation of data. In the beginning, there was just data.