It was interesting to listen to Vannevar Bush describe a lot of the computational problems of mass data collection et al, and then how his current technology could be outfitted or maybe further evolved to solve such problems, which is a future we entered and have even now maybe passed. It makes me wonder how he thought of all these solutions, was he just so close to the advancing technology and had hunches about its future evolution to solve particular problems? Was he really deeply understanding some underlying problem like mass data collection and processing? I'm also a little curious what his piers thought of these guesses of the future.
In this class, I'm really excited to learn whats so hard about making databases. My intuition tells me it shouldn't be a tremendous endeavor, but of course I seem to be wrong. All this attention and energy put towards making and 'maintaining' databases doesn't fit with my intuition, and I'm excited for my intuition to be improved. In the final two articles, I can't tell whether they agree or disagree on whether NoSQL or SQL is better. The fourth praises Hadoop, the fifth praises using abstract relations because it allows for high malleability when the data being structured changes. I can't tell quite what's being argued.
The second and third article was interesting history into this world of computer science that I was not familiar with before, and I'm glad I know now.