Actually, IBM and Germany have a long history of state driven digital innovation …
Comment on The German government is working on an OSS "Sovereign Workplace"
Herrmens@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I am curious how this will turn out. Germany is not known for state driven digital innovation and this is a huge project.
Even though I am highly sceptic, I hope they finally manage to get something going because Germany and whole Europe needs more independence from US hyperscalers.
I fear this will die in good old German bureaucracy though.
ck_@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
misk@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
Long history would imply continuity, not “so long ago that nobody in the comment section is old enough to have lived through it”.
Herrmens@lemmy.world 8 months ago
But surprised by the backlash here, but I was thinking 21 century Germany.
And in the last 20 years germany did not manage to do anything when it comes to digitalization. Hell, our schools still use overhead projectors.
filister@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Not to forget that fax machines are still in use, the German government is using an excessive amount of paper and the lack of any type of digitalization or even a strategy to solve this problem on a national level
0x0@programming.dev 8 months ago
Glad comments don’t get disappeared through downvoting, it’s bad when people want to erase history.
otl@lemmy.sdf.org 8 months ago
[…] and this is a huge project.
This makes me skeptical too. I’d be interested to hear about smaller projects to replace some creaky system relying on the output of some long-gone contractor’s overengineered software being faxed around.
Those projects have no cool name and are probably really hard to get funding for. But sometimes I can’t help but feel that might be more effective than these “big bang” projects.
Miaou@jlai.lu 8 months ago
Oh clearly, let me fill my taxes online please
Miaou@jlai.lu 8 months ago
Oh clearly, let me fill my taxes online please
Miaou@jlai.lu 8 months ago
Oh clearly, let me fill my taxes online please
jasondj@ttrpg.network 8 months ago
Dude Germany is literally the reason we have computers.
People love to give Turing all the credit, but he wouldn’t have needed to build it if not for the Germans.
rockSlayer@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Turing and Church did a lot of the heavy lifting for the theoretical side and contributed heavily to automating the decoding of the enigma encryption, but the most common modern computer architecture was decided in a conference in New York. The person that is credited with designing the architecture is named John Von Neumann.
Before them, it was Babbage, an Englishman. How did Germany contribute to computers? That’s not to say that I don’t think Germany can’t handle designing this software, they definitely can. But they didn’t have a very big hand in the history of computers
jadero@programming.dev 8 months ago
I’m not sure, but I think they were making a joke. Germany created the Enigma machine. Turing et al did some seminal work as a result of the need to quickly decrypt Enigma messages. Ergo, we wouldn’t have computers without the Germans.
lol3droflxp@kbin.social 8 months ago
Zuse built the arguably first digitally programmable computer or something like that.
fluke@snake.substantialplumbing.repair 8 months ago
I’ve three bridges to sell to you
Scrath@feddit.de 7 months ago
I wouldn’t go as far as to say that without germans we wouldn’t have computers today. What he is probably referencing is the Zuse Z3, which can be considered one of the first computers.
The main argument against it being the first is that it’s a mechanical design rather than electronic and that turing completeness was only achieved on it much later using a trick which the designer had not intended. Interestingly, ENIAC, which is considered the first computer by many, uses a decimal design. The Z3 on the other hand was already using binary.
I took this info from the german wikipedia article on the Z3. I’m not sure if the english article goes into similar detail on those points.
nikscha@feddit.de 8 months ago
Konrad Zuse actually invented the computer at the same time as Turing, and in complete intellectual isolation from Turing.
Agent641@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Was it in base-10 rather than binary?
lemmyvore@feddit.nl 8 months ago
The person that is credited with designing the architecture is named John Von Neumann.
If you’re thinking of the stores program concept it wasn’t Newmann, but it’s a common misconception. Newmann credited Turing for it. Independently, the concept was described in a patent application by Konrad Zuse as early as 1936.
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 8 months ago
Probably like DE-mail.
heeplr@feddit.de 8 months ago
DE-mail was doomed to fail from the start. Here, they did some things right. Let’s see how it turns out.
onlinepersona@programming.dev 8 months ago
What’s that?
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 8 months ago
Grmerman encrypted E-Mail service for official business (taxes and so on). Nice idea but execution was broken from start. German government doing IT is a running joke.
emhl@feddit.de 7 months ago
It wasn’t end to end encrypted though because that wouldn’t have allowef server side virus scanning
onlinepersona@programming.dev 8 months ago
Pity :/ They have millions to spend.
onlinepersona@programming.dev 8 months ago
I believe so too, but there is hope because at least they’re trying something. It should be “released” into the alpha stage in December, but I have no idea what it will look like.