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From the archives

The (Other) October Crisis

A new book revisits one of Canada’s most traumatic and telling moments

Andrea Lawlor

Model Behaviour

A Haida village as seen in a windy city

John Geddes

Liberal Interpretations

Making sense of Justin Trudeau and his party

Curtis Gillespie

Tosca

Mary Rykov

 

We were hoping

you might think

things through,

try to get over it.

 

No matter your

beloved Cavaradossi

lies executed

at your feet,

 

Liberty is in the air,

Art will prevail and

you, luscious diva,

can love again.

 

Floria, stop! Let

fly your faith to

unfetter hope. Just

this time, please —

 

please don’t jump. Fling

that nasty Spoletta

off the parapet instead.

Capisce?

Mary Rykov

Mary H. Rykov is a Toronto-based music therapist and academic editor who has written and reviewed for such as The Arts in Psychotherapy, Journal of Palliative Care and the Journal of Health Psychology. Her poems have been published in Carousel, Misunderstandings Magazine and Jones Avenue, and anthologized in Close to Quitting Time: An Anthology Depicting the Various Facets of Work (Ascent Aspirations, 2011) and The Art of Poetic Inquiry (Backalong Books, 2012). She searches for a publisher for her first poetry collection, Dear Mr. Rilke and Other Poems.

Related Letters and Responses

Ray Argyle Kingston, Ontario

The hidden implications of cloud computing, as set out in Tom Slee’s able review of To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World, warrant a Canadian footnote on the origins of this technology. Beginning in the 1970s, several Canadian data companies provided an early version of cloud computing, except they called it “shared processing.” One of the pioneers was Richard G. Taylor, who founded Datacrown as a retailer of surplus cycles from Crown Life’s massive (for that era) IBM System/370 computers.

My PR/ad agency was retained to help Datacrown convince conservative corporate executives that it was more economical and efficient to access its computers than to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in upgrading their own machines. The introduction of “virtual memory” on the System/370s, allowing vastly greater storage and processing capacity, accelerated this trend. We created various campaigns to overcome customer concerns, including security. I headlined one of our ads: “Anything your computer can do, our computer can do. Better.”

Many of the Canadian computer service companies were later subsumed into IBM. The philosophy of that ad, however, continues as a hallmark of cloud computing with its promise to relieve the user of worries about capacity, cost and security.

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