IT and Nature: Penguin, Deer and Metal

To an ordinary person, a penguin is a well-insulated flightless aquatic creature roaming in the wild, perhaps in the poles, stomping around like podgy lawyers in their suits. Hardly a symbol of great leaps in technology. Gertrude saw very clearly in the intervals of chomping through some peanuts, that computers had newness bubbling around them. Computers had odd connections to a penguin, a deer and some form of metal. Not to forget, even sometimes the stuff she was eating. Kernels.

Ages ago, Gertrude had taken lessons in computers on the first floor of a three storey builing about six minutes away from home. She had theory lessons and she had lab lessons. In the lab, she used something called DOS. She had to learn by rote some phrases like copy con, mkdir and rename in order to pass her exams and to get the large humpback white and black machine to cooperate with her. She was told that this was the operating system of the computer with who she was corresponding.

To Gertrude, the operating system was like a shop assistant who never went to sleep and ceaselessly handled requests from the customer and from the proprietor of the shop.

Anybody could ask this shop assistant to bring out all the stock from the Personal Accessories section, or a very specific bag from the top shelf on the left most side and he would oblige. The operating system was like that: fetched files and data from anywhere in the computer and knew where to find them. You could shut the shop, but if you knocked on it by clicking a button, the efficient shop assistant would wake up and switch on all the lights, just like the computer booted up.

The Kernel is the part of the computer that manages how people make requests of the shop assistant, and how much the shop assistant remembers and how much he runs around servicing people's demands.

There are operating systems for a computer, for a network and for phones and for routers! There are commercial ones like Windows from Microsoft which everyone's neighbour should own by now. There are also open-source operating systems like Unix. This means that Gertrude doesn't have to pay for the operating system. And if she wanted, she could also write programs herself to make the little shop assistant inside the computer do things that he didn't already do.

That said, for decades now, people have commitedly tried to come up with smarter operating systems (OS) and have been even more committed in naming them. The greatest sorrow for the poet in Gertrude is to have known of an open source OS carelessly named Haiku. The OS called RTOS was created by a company called RoweBots. There is Acorn, an OS symbolic of an eatable. AmigaOS like a friendly Spanish word. Apple again, for fruit eaters with exorbitant variants like Newton, Lisa and Macintosh. The prize for the most proper techie names would surely go to IBM for featuring godimportant and unpronounceable names like OS/2 MVS/XA TOS/360, DPPX, ACP, UTS.

Gertrude could not bring herself to get interested much in operating systems for little hand held things. Sure, there is the Android, iPhone OS, Blackberry (again, fruits) Palm OS and Newton OS. But there is Linux as well. Linux is a remarkable open source operating system created by a certain Linus Torvalds. Apparently Linus had a heated debate about whether Linux was a microkernal or a monolithic kernel. Whatever that means! Linus contracted penguinitis around the time there was a Linux logo design competition. A chap called Larry Ewing designed this now famous little mascot and the bird was named Tux. It was either short for tuxedo or Torvalds UniX. Gertrude gasped when she realised that Facebook runs on Linux (as per the LAMP stack of - Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP)!

Gertude confesses that she is even less inclined to think about router operating systems. She is already struggling to understand Network Operating Systems and would be grateful for any help. Although she has read about Ghost, all she has picked up is that if you have a (dumb?) computer (these days called a netbook), an invisible operating system over on the internet can manage your files and programs. This operating system and all the paraphernalia would be sitting on a cloud. But of course! Several, several people could reach out for this through their web browser. Is a browser operating system different from a network operating system? Novell had the OS called Netware. Perhaps that was used for computers in a private network?

Interestingly, the concept of the deer and the metal are also browser operating systems. The Gazelle is from Microsoft and Chrome OS is from Google. The Chrome OS runs on top of a Linux Kernel. And Gazelle has its own little elf. The world would wonder about corporate battles, the open sourceness, the security, who develops new features, support to various devices like printers, support to competing browsers and assorted programs. Gertrude shares in these questions and adds one of her own. Would they have a mascot?

IT and Nature: Cloud Computing

When she first started to hear of cloud computing and its definitions (computing is moved to a 'cloud') appeared rather self referential to Gertrude. It amused her in mild amounts. At school, she had often chuckled while learning that sulphuric acid was an ingredient in the manufacture of sulphuric acid.

Cloud computing seemed to make more sense than the manufacture of an irrelevant acid. For a company online Gertrude concluded, that it meant less worrying about an important computer suddenly malfunctioning. Less worry, because their online existence would be sustained by the combined effort of a vast number of computers. So, it would be as easy as opening up a tap to full-volume if they wanted to pile on more hardware for storage or processing power. This would be on a need-basis as the website yo-yo-ed between unknown and popular. And for the company, it would be pay-by-meter for how much they kept the tap open.

So, actually, a cloud had to be something tangible (someone had to know where it was or own it, right?) like servers and so on. Stacked in some place (may be, called a cloud) for consumers to subscribe to it. The subscribers didn't have to worry about not getting connected if there was heavy traffic to the site. They didn't even have to install anything to be able to access the software they wanted. Like installing Flash to watch movies or play games. If they had an internet connection, all their data and information processing would happen wherever they were.

For some people, Gertrude found eventually, the concept of cloud computing was dé ja vu. And some even said it was to reduce the IT industry's carbon foot print. All very very incredible.

Do I know of applications that use Cloud computing, Gertrude wondered. Facebook, Youtube and Google documents seemed compelling examples. And Sliderocket, an online slide creation tool, which you-know-who would love.

She wanted to find out if there was also the possibility of collaborative multi-platform visualisation tools such dabbledb being on a cloud?


Gertrude suddenly wondered if the cloud meant something to her personally. If Gertrude didn't have to to teach her mum over phone how to install Skype or Picasa and then find it in Program Files it would be much relief! But again, her mum wouldn't approve of storing personal finances with Google. Surely not! Some people had thought of these things already and said it was a trap!

Gertrude remembered her last flight which had been quite bumpy and not very reassuring. A lovely co-passenger had offered her company and conversation and asked her to imagine a fluffy white cloud, where every security she wanted was inside the cloud. She did. It worked. As soon as the flight ended, Gertrude had let go of the cloud.