"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
- Edsger Dijkstra, 1930-2002
I've been in computing for a long time, working on countless projects, large and small, at every level of the OSI Systems Inrterconnection Reference Model. Over a longer span of years than vanity allows me to enumerate here, I've been "'round the block," as they say.
So, I wondered how it was, then, that my kids always managed to stump me by asking the simplest possible question: Dad, what do you do for a living?
For all my experience programming, installing, upgrading, configuring, maintaining, and retiring thousands of "things," could it be that I didn't really know, in any fundamental sense, what I was doing? That I'd never come to terms with the deep basics of Information Technology?
So many things, so many distractions: computers, from laptops to servers to mainframes; data storage systems, from high-end multi-terabyte farms to the tiny iPod; the dizzying array of networking widgets, from firewalls to gateways to hubs...
So many things, each with their own special language to learn and master... But, does their mastery make me an auhentic master, or just some modern-day Nimrod?
Question: Peering past all these distractions, straining to find a way out of Babel, what is all of our "stuff" really for?
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