Looking Forward

This hints at my age, but I remember buying my first computer when the kids were in grade school. It was an Apple Macintosh LC, which I believe was the first Mac to support color graphics. There were a few games we could play on it (Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego), and I used it for work, mainly as a word processor with an early version of Microsoft Word for Macs.

The unit filled a good portion of my desk, even though it had only 2 MB of memory. The salesperson at Comp USA had told me I’d never need any more than that. It had a clunky keyboard that required much more exertion to press key than today’s sleek versions, although not as much as a manual typewriter. The mouse was rectangular and not very ergonomically friendly, and, of course, it has the slot to mount a 3.5-inch storage disc, onto which you could write about 40 kilobytes of information. In today’s terms, that’s about three Microsoft Word files this size of this one I’m typing away on at the moment.

Now 30 years later, that was the Stoneage of data. We chiseled our important information onto these diskettes and slid them into little racks or trays to keep them at our fingertips on our desks. It was all so simple.

Now I don’t even understand where all the data I create and collect goes. To the cloud? But what is this cloud? Where is this cloud? It must be a big cumulonimbus type of cloud because as a society we must be creating billions of 3.5-inch discs worth of data by the hour.

The geospatial sciences are collecting much of that data, and keeping track of it has become an issue. In this issue, Norman Barker, vice president of TileDB takes an interesting look at the future of data storage, management, and usage on page 18.

Another critical issue we explore this month is the construction industry’s slow progression to building information modeling. Our expert, Marc Delgado, takes an in-depth look into why and examines how this is changing.

I hope you enjoy these stories and the others in this issue.

– Jeff Thoreson