RaidOnTumbolia

In his classic book entitled Godel, Escher, Bach[1], DouglasHofstadter created a place called Tumbolia. Tumbolia is described as the land of dead hiccups and extinguished light bulbs. A place of "non-things".

There is lots of software in Tumbolia. Software that is just sitting around, waiting for the system it is installed on to invoke it, to start it up, to bring it to life. Nothing happens in Tumbolia. Nothing at all.

Nothing is alive there.

Based on this description, you might want to take a second to strike Tumbolia off your list of places to visit. It is a lot more pleasant to think about Tumbolia from a safe distance rather than go there. Pull up a chair and we will contemplate its mysteries together for a couple of minutes.

Most computer systems have a built-in Tumbolia. The laptop currently on my knees for example. There are lots of applications installed on it. At any one time, only some of these are alive - in memory. That is, at any given moment a certain number of applications are running and the rest are, well, in Tumbolia.

The only applications I can really interact with are the live ones. Once alive, I can do wonderful things to business data with the help of applications. When they disappear off to Tumbolia, most of their power disappears too. All my documents, all my spreadsheets, all my databases, all my ledgers - they are lifeless tubs of lard when the application that created them is not alive on my machine.

This is achingly, bone-crunchingly obvious and I'm sure at this stage you are wondering where I am going with this. Let us ask a "what if" question. What if applications never went to Tumbolia? What if applications stayed running all the time? Why do we stop and start applications anyway?

For most of the history of computing, there has been a very simple answer to this - memory. Memory has always been in short supply relative to the size of applications. So much so that tremendous effort has been expended building specialized software that swaps applications into and out of Tumbolia very quickly. We call them "operating systems".

Today, memory is a lot cheaper than it used to be. I have a Gigabyte of RAM in this machine. Moreover, I do 90 percent of my work with just six applications. I can run all six at the same time comfortably. Indeed, I boot up all six when my machine boots and leave them running all day long. They only go to Tumbolia when I shut my machine down.

Unfortunately, I do not get the value out of these six simultaneously running applications that I should. My operating system is simply not geared up that way. For example, if I have spreadsheet running all the time, why is it that I cannot refer to the values of cells in spreadsheets from within my ledger system? Why is it that I cannot refer to one of my database records from within my Web Browser? Why is it that I cannot load a balance sheet into my word processor by just saying "go get it, it's over there!". Why is it that I cannot refer to this precise paragraph of text in this text file in my e-mail client?

Yes, it is true that some of these scenarios are possible on some operating systems with enough ingenuity and grunt work. However, it should be much easier than it is in my opinion. Why isn't it easy? I suspect it isn't easy to do this sort of temporal integration across applications because applications on a single machine are not generally designed to co-exist temporally. Developers have not historically said to themselves "how can I make my application play nice will all the other applications running right now on this machine?"

It is also not easy because we have no universally standard way of naming information down to the level of cells in spreadsheets or paragraphs of text[3] or records in databases...or have we?

Ah, yes the Web! What if, as a matter of course, all desktop applications shipped with a built-in web server? What if, all applications managed their own catalog of URLs that allow other desktop applications to retrieve pieces of data on the fly. In such a world, sharing data between applications would be a simple matter of HTTP GETs.

What is wrong with this picture? I have a good answer I think. I scribbled it down here somewhere[4]. Ah, yes, I wrote it down here:

SeanMcGrath.blogspot.com/PublicMachine/Spreadsheets/ArticleTopics/Ideas?cell=C12.

Some day, a link like that might just work.

[1] http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com/bookshelf.html#0140289208

[2] http://www.4reference.net/encyclopedias/wikipedia/Tumbolia.html

[3] http://www.eekim.com/software/purple/purple.html

[4] http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FermatsLastTheorem.html

This story, "Raid on Tumbolia: A rescue mission for business data" was originally published by ITworld.