Teema nr1: Lessons and learnings form the History of IT



Any major development in human’s technological development, and IT field is certainly major, cannot be taken in isolation from changes in a society. For centuries, breakthroughs in technology used by humans were driven by military needs or with military as a tool for advancing trade routes.

Need to produce more and better quality swords have driven material science and metallurgy advances, thus humans moved from Bronse age to Iron age.
Desire to dominate on sea routes, led to discovery of America’s (a.k.a. “West Indies”) in 1493 and “magnetic declination” by Christopher Columbus in the same journey. Geography, Astronomy, maths advanced all in one journey.
Development of Enigma code machine by German engineer Arthur Scherbius and subsequent efforts by Polish and British mathematicians and cryptographers have played significant role in military efforts on the Western Front of WW2.
Even the birth of internet would be severely delayed if not for the discoveries made during the ARPANET (Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) – TCP/IP, email developments, packet switching implementations among them.

With this list not nearly finished, we see long and fruitful history of military and STEM sciences cooperation, one does feel confident that such cooperation will continue and will bring more “fruits” in the future.
But what we can learn from this co-operation? What could be reasons that led to success of this unlikely co-operation?

We all know that there cannot be success without failures. For every significant discovery or breakthrough – there are thousands for experiments, trials, hypothesizes, which have failed. What brings fruits is consistency and determination in continuation of experimenting, adjusting your direction, based on previous results and moving forward. As Thomas Edison said "I have not failed 700 times, I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work".

States treat their security quite seriously and allocate significant budgets to military. These funds allow for long-term, fundamental studies to be developed, allow for thousands failed experiments and still stubbornly, doggedly continue required research.

We may not like military style of management or disapprove their aims or methods, but we have to look at lessons learned: human desire to advance their interests by military means have brought consistency in implementation and funds to STEM and IT sciences in the past that have been fruitful and will continue be fruitful until the end of this civilization. Which, paradoxically, may as well be a direct result of such co-operation.

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