| enough science fiction writing for tonight
There is one claim in there that is absolute science fiction:
PROMIS can integrate innumerable databases without requiring any reprogramming. In essence, PROMIS can turn blind data into information.In a word: bullsh*t. Here's a 32-bit integer. What is it? Is it big-endian or little-endian? Is that a value? Is it a date? Is it a categorical? Is it a record number in another table? Which table? PROMIS figures this out by itself? Yeah, sure it does... on Star Trek. But not on Earth, and not now. People who work in data analysis shops have to fight that battle every day. There's no automated anything that does that. It's drudgery, and only humans can do it, because it requires guesses and intution. |
Indeed. To someone unfamiliar with computers, that may all sound amazing, but "computer people" would recognize those capabilities as the features of any off-the-shelf DBMS. Hamilton deserves credit for having created such a thing as early as he did. He and Dick Pick might have been the only guys selling such a thing back then; the mainframers were still doing ISAM files in those days.