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Future of job search Episode 7
April 25th, 2008
2100 Episode 7 Grandad’s database
While working on his Agility projects, (which seemed to be creating more work with each stage), Johnny got a request from his grandfather, on Mars, to upload his old database so he could show his new girlfriend some of the things he’d done back in 2040. He was also worried that if he didn’t get all the old data converted he’d never be able to use it, so there was a practical side to the idea, too.
There was a problem doing that, because the database was cobbled together bits of old codes which no longer ran on Trinary and Quarternary software. There was some old binary code, and some weird things which used actual language with numeric code, very messy stuff indeed, and, naturally, nothing like the algebraic computer language now in use. Patiently, Johnny extracted each so-called file, and tried to convert them.
A file was an old, pre hyper reference, individual piece of work on a computer, which had a name given by the user. They didn’t have the find-anything Single Reference System until 2055. It was very demanding work, trying to figure out how the huge mass of personal data was supposed to work. The files were in things called folders, not multi-linked to every reference.
Apparently if you didn’t know where to look, you had to do a computer search of everything on the computer. (With SRS you just put a name on a screen, verbally or using a pad, and a dialog box did the rest.)
Fortunately for his grandfather, Johnny was one of the few people on Earth who knew how to access old files like that. He’d been trained in old technologies as one of his Computer Science electives, and had built his own computer using the technology of the 2020s as a project. (The 2020s were the period where the old and new operating systems and codes were running simultaneously.) He had the computer delivered to Brazil and went to work deciphering the files.
There were thousands of the things. He opened one at random, called Job App WVY 10 March 2031. It was the earliest date he’d been able to find, and he naturally thought if he could open that, he’d be able to figure out how to open all the other old files.
The file ran on a so-called predecessor operating system called Windows, designed by one of the companies that created Googlesoft. The predecessors were the old proprietary operating systems on which the new systems were based. They’d been the major privately owned global software systems, and were all incorporated into the new Universal Operator System imposed by long suffering patent offices and courts.
Fortunately Johnny had got honors in his studies of the old systems. It was a tricky system by modern standards, using things called applications, which were special software required to open files. Antique stuff by Johnny’s standards, where anything could be opened directly by computer operating systems, with no need for specific codes.
Job App WVY 10 March 2031 was opened, after Johnny recoded practically everything into BinaryShareTrinary, or BST. Trinary will run on Quaternary systems quite well, but binary has to be converted into Trinary, because it’s just too primitive for Quaternary to read.
It was like a museum. It was, obviously, a job application, but the thing was… ancient. It was like finding Aristotle giving his lecture on ethics, live. There was something called a Workplace Video, which was what they now called a Job Visual. His grandfather, who could have been no more than 20, was working in some sort of place where everyone was in little cell-like things made of partitions.
Johnny had see this in history classes, usually used as lessons to show how much better society had become, since then. His grandfather didn’t look too oppressed, even allowing for the weird environment. (In Johnny’s time there was no such thing as a workplace. People just went where they needed to be, or worked from home.)
There were even sound clips, in which his juvenile granddad explained the workings of the technology he was using, which was some sort of architectural CAD, but really primitive, no 3D projections or anything. The nearest thing to a modern visual effect was something called Virtual Reality, which was apparently very unreliable when it shifted focus.
Fascinated, Johnny watched as this one man history lesson went through the entire presentation. The Workplace Video was a forerunner of the modern Job App Ref, which was a system ref to one’s entire work history, education, and other related information, which now took about 20 seconds to compile and authorize to be used. You simply logged in to your personal records, compiled your official work history, added your application, and sent it off as a Ref which the addressee, and nobody else, could open.
Johnny found out it had taken his grandfather three weeks to put together his application. The amount of information required for a job app became so bizarre that they eventually changed the labor laws so employers couldn’t make unreasonable demands for data.
Johnny could well believe it. He’d seen old PhD databases which took up much less space than his grandfather’s job app.
The whole file took two hours to run, and Johnny got so interested that he forgot to do anything else about his granddad’s database. Even with his special qualifications, he’d never seen half of the stuff his granddad was doing, and he was an acknowledged expert. Something kept bothering him, and he didn’t know what.
He contacted his grandfather and told him what he’d found. His granddad said that particular application had never even received a reply. Eventually Johnny figured it out. He was looking at materials which according to his grandfather may never have been seen since they were made.
Stunned, excited, and according to his wife incoherent, he began searching for the history of CAD. Sure enough, there was nothing pre 2050, on the entire global net, or the special World Museum archives, which Johnny actually designed. This was the only remaining information about that system.
He spent another day browsing his grandfather’s files, and in every single work-related file, he found something which had vanished from history, either technology or unfamiliar relics like old cars or appliances.
(Johnny didn’t even know what a washing machine was. He had to look it up.)
The Digital Revolution had created massive amounts of information. It produced more data every second than the human race had produced in the whole of recorded history, but it had also managed to lose quite a lot in the deluge of data.
By the time he’d finished, Johnny was able to upload all his granddad’s data, and a payment for 5 million currency units from the World Museum.
His grandfather married his girlfriend the following week.
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