|
I just discovered this morning that the 1957 movie Desk Set is now available on DVD. The story evolves around an Electronic Brain (a computer) the size of an SUV and the romance between Spencer Tracy--the Electronic Brain's designer, and Katherine Hepburn, head librarian in a corporate library. I can relate to this movie on multiple levels, since I am a nerd with an advanced Librarian degree. The Electronic Brain is installed in a corporate library to alleviate the librarians (of which there are four) of the mundane tasks of repetitive information delivery, like reciting the names of Santa's reindeer. The librarians are, instead, threatened by the computer and fear it will replace them. Its truly a classic movie.
Back in 1990 when I was starting writing business applications on the PC in an academic library environment, I wrote an application which essentially did the job of a person on staff, which was collecting and reporting on “online searches“ for pay-by-the-second services like Lexus-Nexus, BRS, and Dialog (I can't believe I remember those names.) So, shortly after my heady Turbo Pascal/Dbase III app went into production, they canned the person whose job it was to go through the paper copies of the search summaries and record the information. I remember being very pleased that a computer program I wrote could replace a human being. I'll have to remember that when a future version of .NET replaces me. In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy Desk Set on DVD! |
 |