#ICYDK: In the Beginning, There Was Nothing
If you think about it, standards and protocols start popping up after the task they’re meant to simplify has been around for a while and no two groups are doing it the same way. This holds true for software, a recent example being how mobile development became standardized, and you can now even create a single application that will work on all major OS’s (it wasn’t too long ago when you had to use different technologies for different models of devices from the same company).
So, in the beginning, when the need for distributed computing appeared and different systems needed to communicate with each other, the first solutions weren’t exactly open. In the 70s, one of the first recorded system integration technologies was called EDI (Electronic Data Interchange). It was developed to allow companies to exchange valuable documents seamlessly with each other. There was no standard that could easily be implemented in any language. Instead, EDI provided a set of software tools that would let you perform the exchange. Another key aspect to EDI is the fact that the documents being exchanged had very specific and well-defined formats they were allowed to be in. https://goo.gl/gPfFkw #DataIntegration #ML
