Cold war and data tranfer

 

At the beginning of the Cold War, to the best of my knowledge, there

was only one "real" functioning computer on earth.  It is possible there

were others, but mostly the one the U..S. had was all I am aware of.

Official communication was done with typewriters and paper.  For

some reason, at that time, people felt like, if it was written on a

typewriter it was official or of some value, and I am not sure

exactly why, but it might have had something to do with sale

efforts by I.B.M.


Anyway the data problem was IMHO, mostly about lots of

miscommunication in a large variety of ways.  It of course

should have been easier at that time to deal with it or a least

figure it out, but really, for what ever reasons, that did not

happen.   


Today we have a countable (but large) number of computers in the world

and a lot of " official " communication is done that way.  For

practical purposes the computers are used in similar ways to

how typewriters were used 70 years ago, but there is a lot more

communicated and so at this point we are dealing with a lot

of the same problems that we had 70 years ago, except different.


Although, the problems we are having today, are similar except

at that time,(1950) it was primarily source and destination.

Today, source and destination problems have become way more

complicated because of networks but still very similar

in some ways,  There is a " congruency " in what is happening.


Of course, in reality, this problem has been going on for a long

time, and although, it seems like the Cold War, is distinctive

in that way, most wars really seem to be, to some degree

connected with these issues.


At the end of the day, however, the problem is solvable.

Mostly the solution is how we communicate with each

other and the integrity, and clarity connected with those

communications.


In conclusion, although miscommunication does occur as well

in the scientific community, over the years, that community has

consistently found effective ways to circumvent some of the

above issues.  Clearly there are many different and different types

of communities involved with these issues.

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