My Digital Life

I was just going through my RSS feeds and spotted a post from Laughing Squid about a video IBM commissioned in 1968 as a glossary of computer terms.

I was going to send it as a joke to a mate of mine who’s doing something similar, but having watched it I was surprised that it’s all still more or less accurate.  Not sure why it surprised me, after all the basic principles are all still the same.  I guess I still think of this stuff as being modern!  It’s easy to forget that we’re not really doing anything new… we’re just doing in differently.  Hell, before computers people managed and organised data and information quite happily for centuries.

Oh… and there’s a nice bit of early DeepZooming in there too!

A computer glossary or, coming to terms with the data processing machine from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

Working for a company that does significant amounts of design work, being a ‘Microsoft house’ can cause our users some headaches.  Although the design guys all love their mac’s, as an IT group traditionally it’s been hard for us support them and integrate them into the rest of our environment.  There are plenty of aspects to this problem and it’s something I’ll be writing about more over the coming months.  For now though, lets just say its an area that we know we can do better in.

It was with great interest then that I read this post over on RoughlyDrafted about IBM’s own testing and pilot project for Mac’s.  I imagine that IBM’s drivers are much the same our own, end user demand being weighed against a business driver for IT cheaper IT services - and hence an standardised environment.  Not something you’d currently want - or be able - to do with Apple, multi-platform has to be the way forward.

The article is perhaps a little over-zealous, there are huge challenges in providing multi-platform IS services and still being cost effective, but I’ll be watching this with interest.  I think I’ll be calling in my IBM account guys for a chat soon.

Anyone else out there do similar work or running both platform in a big way?