Windows, then and now

RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE

Windows have always fascinated me. A closed window is like a closed mind. Open the window and let your mind wander. When I was about 10 years old, there was a bed of colourful hollyhocks next to my bedroom window. When it was opened, the hollyhocks seemed to be waving and wishing me good morning!

During dull afternoon classes, I’d look out of the large window and wonder how Physics would help me when all that I wanted to do was laze in a meadow and watch the clouds floating by.

Perhaps it was true because at that stage I had no concrete career plans and the years drifted past. Later, when I went on board a ship and looked out of the porthole, I could see the changing colours and moods of the vast ocean.

As time marched on, the meaning of everyday words like windows, ports, and clouds changed drastically. To me, it seems that there is a language within another language where everything that I know of seems to mean something else! The windows of yesterday and the windows of today are vastly different.

One shows you the outside view and the other connects you to multiple sites.
When I requested a colleague to open the window to let in some fresh air, he seemed confused and asked, “You mean restart and refresh?” But that was not what I meant. In today’s digital world, windows don’t open, they crash; clouds are not fluffy balls floating in an azure sky, they store Big Data.

An agnostic is not a believer or disbeliever of God, the word is platform-agnostic and can run on any operating system; a lake is not a placid body of water where men sit patiently with fishing lines, they are data lakes; security does not mean a burglar alarm, it means cybersecurity. Smart is no longer about good grooming or looking dapper, it is used in reference to cities, lighting, or factories.

Recently, I learnt that Smart stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. Now we are getting intelligent, but it is AI (artificial intelligence) or BI (business intelligence). Architecture is not about heritage sites it is about a high-level view of software and system integration. And traffic is not about cars and trucks on our roads, it refers to the number of people who visit your website.

On a daily basis, I get emails about data security blankets, scale-out storage architecture, reality modelling, meta-algorithms etc. and I begin to wonder as to how we’ve all adapted to this major change in vocabulary.

I’m no longer a young girl looking out of the window dreaming of a rosy future. Our digital world is seen through windows and shared platforms. Yet, windows still continue to fascinate me!