Introducing Middleware.
In many ways, humans have been integral to the operation of computer networks, since the dawn of the computer age. In the early 1980′s computers had moved beyond governmental, military and research institutions, and were becoming more common among corporations.
At this stage of their evolution, computer applications were stand-alone. The finance applications of the world lived inside mainframes, and interacted with humans via green screen terminals. The order management systems of the world interacted likewise. Humans were the network, as information could only flow between systems through human intermediaries. For example, a clerk would run a report on one system and re-key the results into the other.
Humans being intelligent, could enforce policies on the flow of information. They could decide what information was appropriate to flow between systems, how quickly it should flow, and how the flow should be achieved.
On the other hand, humans, being error prone, caused this flow of information to be slow, laborious and costly. One day while typing yet another report, a clerk dreamed of letting the computers talk to each other directly. Suddenly, the network revolution had begun.
While the idea was sound, the reality of facilitating this was difficult. Henning (2006) notes, that “persuading programs on different machines to talk to each other was a nightmare, especially if different hardware, operating systems, and programming languages were involved: programmers either used sockets and wrote an entire protocol stack themselves or their programs didn’t talk at all”. What was needed was some sort of automated intermediary between systems.
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