An article in the March 23rd New York Times discusses the role that old technology still plays in the computer business.
Get a load of this: " To survive, technologies must evolve, much as animal species do in nature... Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster in Silicon Valley [said]... 'Technologies want to survive, and they reinvent themselves to go on.'"
Yes! The technologies reinvent themselves. Apparently there are no designers. Now, I work for IBM, have for more than 3 decades. There is a museum of sorts in the corporate headquarters, showing the progress of computing over time. And there are no small, random, undirected changes in the chronology. On the contrary, there are huge changes in the technology. (When IBM announced the System 360, for instance, it was viewed at the time as a "bet the company" move because it represented such a radical departure from previous technology.)
I say again: we confuse ourselves about evolution, and about the world around us, when we misapply the term. We end up babbling nonsense. I offer Paul Saffo as the poster child for incoherence.
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