Just a few supplementary notes: anyone who's ever entered filled out one of those little questionnaires as you pre-register for a doctor's appointment or a medical procedure on a patient portal (or on a pad as you sit in the waiting room) should be aware that that information, which we would like to think is HIPAA protected, is added to the cumulative database of information about you (& everyone else you know that has done anything similar) whether w/a pen on paper or on your phone.
And Oracle, the company, was started by 3 guys who used to work at a company called Ampex, (those of you who are boomers may remember Ampex as a manufacturer of recording tape on which you might have laid down the tunes that you used to groove to, way back when) which actually had a far broader technological scope & was also involved in early computing & database management. It may not seem as obvious today, but relational database management was deep & essential to the foundations of the computer technology that began to support the functioning of the world back in the early to mid 70s. These 3 guys who eventually broke off to found their own company, which later became known as Oracle, lifted that name from the title of the project they were working on, which was broad relational database management for the CIA. And admittedly, it sounds fairly modest, if you think about it: the primary function of the CIA, whatever else we may think about them, is to collect and filter information (or “intelligence,” as in “Central Intelligence Agency”). And if you have a lot of information, a LOT of it, a relational database is what you use to cross reference, exactly the way an organization like the CIA would need to be able to do with speed & deftness.
I can remember a series of schlock pulp novels, years ago, about a secret US agency that had some sort of supercomputer that could look into the dara of any other computational system & use that information (or intelligence), to deduce where there were “problems” in the world that the protagonist of the books would then address, usually with wholesale murder. It was adolescent fantasy, in those days, but the interconnectedness of our data is making very real that same sort of data transparency & the infiltration of Oracle into all of the data that we produce daily would seem to indicate increasing transparency of ALL of our activities, visible to our government, whether we like it or not.
Just a few supplementary notes: anyone who's ever entered filled out one of those little questionnaires as you pre-register for a doctor's appointment or a medical procedure on a patient portal (or on a pad as you sit in the waiting room) should be aware that that information, which we would like to think is HIPAA protected, is added to the cumulative database of information about you (& everyone else you know that has done anything similar) whether w/a pen on paper or on your phone.
And Oracle, the company, was started by 3 guys who used to work at a company called Ampex, (those of you who are boomers may remember Ampex as a manufacturer of recording tape on which you might have laid down the tunes that you used to groove to, way back when) which actually had a far broader technological scope & was also involved in early computing & database management. It may not seem as obvious today, but relational database management was deep & essential to the foundations of the computer technology that began to support the functioning of the world back in the early to mid 70s. These 3 guys who eventually broke off to found their own company, which later became known as Oracle, lifted that name from the title of the project they were working on, which was broad relational database management for the CIA. And admittedly, it sounds fairly modest, if you think about it: the primary function of the CIA, whatever else we may think about them, is to collect and filter information (or “intelligence,” as in “Central Intelligence Agency”). And if you have a lot of information, a LOT of it, a relational database is what you use to cross reference, exactly the way an organization like the CIA would need to be able to do with speed & deftness.
I can remember a series of schlock pulp novels, years ago, about a secret US agency that had some sort of supercomputer that could look into the dara of any other computational system & use that information (or intelligence), to deduce where there were “problems” in the world that the protagonist of the books would then address, usually with wholesale murder. It was adolescent fantasy, in those days, but the interconnectedness of our data is making very real that same sort of data transparency & the infiltration of Oracle into all of the data that we produce daily would seem to indicate increasing transparency of ALL of our activities, visible to our government, whether we like it or not.