Until the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan brouhaha ushered in the notion of tag-team figure skating, it had been at least ten years since anything really interesting happened in ice skating. Even back in the 1984 Winter Olympics, what held the attention of anyone other than hardcore figure-skating devotees was whether or not U.S. figure skater Scott Hamilton's jeans could endure one more Russian split, or if a triple axel would finally dislodge East German Katarina Witt's Jimmy Johnson-like coiffure. In retrospect, it would have been far more interesting had we been able to foresee the current plight of the '84 Winter Olympics host city--Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. And speaking of Russian splits, not only has the past decade brought us the breakup of the U.S.S.R., but the demise of East Germany, Yugoslavia, and other such countries as well.
In the relatively calm world of computer programming, it's hard to believe that ten years have passed since Bjarne Stroustrup introduced the C++ programming language. In the high-octane software-development arena, we've come to believe that things move fast, even though it's taken a decade for C++ to gain little more than a toehold. Stroustrup ostensibly created C++ "to make writing good programs easier and more pleasant for the individual programmer." Still, it's taken the marketing might of companies such as AT&T, Microsoft, Sun, IBM, and Borland to make the language a commercial success. The fact that Smalltalk has been around more than twice as long as C++ with far less success, or that there's so darn much Cobol code still out there, says something about the software-development community's desire to absorb and adopt new languages, not to mention the marketing efforts of C++ vendors.
As it enters its second decade, C++ finally seems entrenched. But even though the language is being used to program everything from PCs to supercomputers, the jury is still out on whether or not Stroustrup's goal of making programmers more productive and software less complex has been--or can be--achieved. The real lesson to be learned here is that software development is a process which does not adapt to change easily. There's almost always too much at stake for programmers to casually pick up one language while discarding another--other than for educational or entertainment reasons. Instead, software development continues to be a process of refinement, with major changes occuring over a decade or more at a time. In short, the real issues don't change--just the marketing hype.
A quick glance at Dr. Dobb's Journal ten years ago underscores this. As with this month's issue, the April 1984 DDJ focused on cryptography, with C.E. Burton's two-part article entitled "RSA: A Public-Key Cryptography System." Without a doubt, cryptography is more important to a greater number of computer programmers and users now than it was a decade ago. Back then, RSA was still fairly new, and Burton's article was probably the first to bring RSA to the microcomputer platform. Today, RSA is clearly the dominant approach to cryptography. While better techniques may have been developed, it is unlikely that in the near future an alternative will achieve the same degree of commercial success as RSA.
1984 was also the year Judge Harold Greene became a household name, at least in the living rooms and kitchens of AT&T executives and stockholders. It was his consent decree, you'll recall, that led to the breakup of the most powerful telecommunications monopoly in the world. Now, ten years after, competition and innovation is finally beginning to catch fire with the Clinton administration's proposals to eliminate barriers between individual electronic-communication industries. However, proposed mergers between cable operators, Baby Bells, entertainment giants, online services, and the like may lead to electronic networks that dwarf the AT&T of yesteryear.
On the plus side, these mergers will fund the advanced information infrastructures we'll be using in the coming years. On the downside, the prospect looms that monopolistic megacorporations will be as unresponsive to the public well-being as Ma Bell was in the old days. For instance, Southwestern Bell, long the bellwether for the RBOCs when it comes to controversial legislation, is currently pushing for a law that would prevent the Missouri Public Service Commission from challenging phone company profits or rates. A draft of the bill reportedly says that Southwestern Bell "shall not under any circumstances be subject to any complaint or hearing as to the reasonableness of its rates, charges, rentals or earnings." Interestingly, this legislation was proposed on the eve of the telephone company's announcement that it had just achieved its best-ever fourth-quarter earnings. The company, which enjoys a monopoly, claims it needs the money to fund the construction of the information superhighway.
Clearly, both the federal and state governments have a responsibility to protect the public good against voracious proposals like that backed by Southwestern Bell. Likewise, the government needs to guarantee that proposed mergers won't result in a single company controlling both telephone lines and cable throughout an individual region. Competition and innovation have stood us well through the past ten years. They can get us through the next decade, too.
Copyright © 1994, Dr. Dobb's Journal