resources | ward & hopper, 1992 [research interview]
Sherman Ward & Mary Hopper, Passages from Personal Interview, June 22, 1992
Passage 1
Hopper: How do you tell when a format becomes something you can believe in? For example, we believe ASCII and PICT will be around tomorrow. But, how do we know when something is going to last?
Ward: The true indicator is when a national standards committee picks something up. Then you get manufacturers involved in attempting to get specifications. When it goes to a national committee, that is when you've got a pretty safe bet. Then even if it does not last, at least there are standards available so that you can undo any damage and recover your data. Consistency will help you, because in computing, video technology, or for that matter, data transmission technology, it's going to keep progressing.
Passage 2
Ward: Somewhere within the team, knowledge must exist about where your technical limits are. It is a requirement to know what the limits of the technology are, and to know how far you can push it before it breaks on you.
Hopper: How do you know if someone really knows the limits of the technology?
Ward: Then you run into a guessing game, and there is no simplistic method. Talking with knowledgeable people is the best way. The other way is to spend the time and money and learn the limits on your own.
Hopper: When you are talking to someone, how do you know if they know the limits of the technology?
Ward: Just due to my knowledge of what the technology is. A lot of our technology implementation is based on my knowledge of how far I can go with it before the technology breaks or we get caught with lack of resources.
Hopper: Do you mean like, ask them to digitize ten minutes of video, and see if they say, "Sure!"
Ward: "And put it on an 800K disk!" But no, a number of the technology issues are subtle. It is not a simple question of "yes you can do something", or "no you can not do it". It is not that overt. The problem is that if you wait six months, it becomes maybe we can. But if you wait a year, it becomes reasonable. It comes down to what is readily done, rather than what is technically possible. A lot of things are technically possible, but not readily done, so you just don't bother.
Passage 3
Ward: We started out in 1988. At that point in time, HyperCard was new, and Macintoshes had only been available for a short 6 months. When Bill LeBold realized he had something that was not a traditional programming tool, he saw extensive possibilities. He had the idea of developing an Engineering Information System similar to Discover. But he wanted to go beyond an Information System. He wanted to incorporate a scheduling system. He was also hoping to incorporate our Purdue Interest Questionnaire, and a multitude of other things that were available across ten different systems at that point. So, we started out on a chalk board, and I used my knowledge of systems development to diagram what parts the project would encompass. We started calculating the storage and some of the physical requirements to incorporate the master plan. Then we saw that in order to incorporate the things that we could do, like the PIQ and the Academic record query, we were talking Gigabytes of data. Back in 1988,
twenty megabytes was a lot of space. After doing that, we came back through a process of elimination, to what was technically possible, and financially doable. At that time, much of it was technically possible, but too extensive in terms of the amount of money, number of man hours, and equipment. So we pulled in our horns and looked at the unique properties of HyperCard and what we could do with that. In essence, we ended up with an information system. Then we asked, "What bits and pieces should we have?"
© Mary E. Hopper [MEHopper] |
MEHopper@TheWorld.com
[posted 01/01/01 | revised 02/02/02]