If you work in any sort of financial institution, companies like airlines, larger hotel chains or any other business that processes customer records for more than 20 years now, you might have come across COBOL applications. The “Common Business Oriented Language” was designed in the 1950s for mainframe computers of that era to build early computer software for businesses. It was designed by a committee consisting of government bodies, computer manufacturers and consultants. Academic bodies were not involved which is also one of many reasons why it was never very popular for academic work. I don’t want to get into the history of COBOL as that is perfectly described in numerous sources elsewhere, like the Wikipedia COBOL article. …
As I watched vintage computing videos, I remembered the days when I used my Palm handheld devices such as the Palm III, Palm V and others. It got me in quite some nostalgic moments and feelings. I ended up on eBay and classifieds websites where I searched around. It did not take long and I found a completely new and unopened Palm m515 from 2002. In a moment of excitement and with a low cost of 20 €, I gave it a shot. A couple of days later a package arrived at my door.
The device, purchased by a kind person in 2002 and locked in the cupboard for at least 17 years, was entirely new and never ever used after it left the factory in its package. Back in the days it was the flagship of Palm Inc. in the hopes to compete with Pocket PCs and other organizer devices. It came with PalmOS 4.1, a color display, the pen, numerous manuals and of course a Lithium-Ion battery. The battery would prove to be the first challenge. …
We all know examples of everyday annoyances, awkward self-service systems and websites that just don’t seem right. We’ve all browsed retail, travel, banking websites and apps for ages just to figure out we couldn’t buy the desired product or services the way we’d expect. At the beginning of the 21st century it was accepted that some technology was just not mature enough to be used in our everyday lifes. But today? Why do so many digital initiatives and systems by so many organisations just don’t succeed, don’t work the way we’d expect or become some sort of awkward beast?
It is more than a decade ago that I was involved in a discussion around artifical intelligence and machine learning where someone refused to accept that the computer would make business decisions itself without a human being able to understand each decision. Hence, the system was downgraded to be a mere set of easily understandable and traceable rules than an autonomous automated machine learning system. People were reluctant to hand the decision-making process over to the machine. It was about that time when I became curious why organisations of all types seem to struggle with technology. …
If you love fiddling around with electronics, C/C++ programming and making small things, then IoT is for you and this tutorial might help you get a glimpse of AWS IoT and what it can do (hint: absolutely everything!)
In short what this is about
In this article or tutorial I will explain how to connect an ST Microelectronics STM32 Discovery kit IoT Node with AWS IoT using ARM Mbed OS to display temperature, humidity and air pressure on an S3 website hosted through CloudFront.
What is AWS IoT about?
In order to understand this article it is absolutely recommended to have at least an idea of what AWS, the Amazon cloud, does. Beside all these large scale services that AWS offers, it also offers a nice set of IoT services. …
