What’s This Any-to-Any Thing?
The first PC I owned had two floppy disc drives. You had to have two drives, because you put your program disc in the left drive and your data disc in the right one. You see, there was no main hard drive, or storage disc, as we have today. Let me show you:
You can see the two floppy drives in the front there.
So here I am, writing a letter to my mother. I put the Word Processing program floppy in the left drive, and an empty data floppy in the right one. Then I fire up the program and write my letter.
And I could write several letters to different people and store them on the same data floppy on the right. And that’s because that one Word Processing program can generate and read many documents.
But now I want to check my credit card transactions. So, I have to remove both floppies and load the spreadsheet program floppy in the left drive and the data floppy containing my credit card transactions spreadsheet in the right drive and fire it up once more. And, once again, I could create and/or open many different spreadsheets in the right drive with the Spreadsheet Program that is in the left one. But I can’t open Word Processing documents with the Spreadsheet Program.
Now, consider what happened a few years later. IBM came out with their first laptop, and being a staff member, I jumped on it straight away – the staff price was quite amazing! Here’s what it looked like, and here’s me in 1989 using it. Not so much grey hair then…
But I had an immediate problem, because they had changed the floppy disc drives and were now using the new diskette drives. Here is the new and the old disc format.
In itself, this was a good idea – diskettes had much large storage capacity than the floppies, and were smaller, more rigid (no longer floppy, in fact) and were faster at transferring data. All good points. But the old 5 ¼ inch floppy would not fit into the diskette drive on the new machine. This meant that I could not get to all the data I had previously created and stored.
Now, it’s not much different today. If you open Microsoft Word to write a document, and then you want to open your credit card transaction spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel. You still have to change the program. The Windows environment means you can have multiple programs open at the same time, but each program’s data has a unique construction that other programs cannot read directly. Therefore, you can’t open a Word document using the Excel program.
So, what’s going on here? The whole structure that computing systems are running on today is based on creating one type of thing to work with many other things. My first PC had floppy disc drives. You could put many different programs and data files into those drives, but only if they were on floppy discs – you could not put the new, smaller, diskettes into the floppy drive.
The Word Processing Program could produce as many documents as you like, but it could not produce, or open, spreadsheets. The relationships here are totally fixed. You could only create Word Processing documents with the word program. And the spreadsheet program could only create and read spreadsheet files, not text documents.
The relationships here are what we call “One to Many”; one program – many documents. But that’s not the way that people think. And the ExoBrain is built using the same principles that people use when they think.
So, let’s look at how people think. If you see a startling mountain scene, you automatically capture that image for future use, along with the smell of the cool mountain air, the fragrance of the pine trees, the temperature of the day, the time of the day, who you are with, etc., etc. You don’t have to “start a new program” in order to capture the landscape, and then start another one to record the sounds, or to record the smell of the pine cones. It’s all there, in one big bucket of data. And you can get to any of that data you want, regardless of what it consists of.
And the reason you can get to that data so easily is that you can relate any of the pieces of data to any of the other pieces of data. You might be reminded of the previous mountain scene because you see a similar scene, or because you are with the same people, or because you smell the same pinecones. It doesn’t matter, because you can relate any part of the current scene to any part of the previous one.
You see, it doesn’t matter what type of data it is that you are recording. And it doesn’t matter what type of data you are recalling. You can get to any data, regardless of what type of data it is. And it’s the same with the ExoBrain.
On top of that, the data stored in an ExoBrain is not separated out into different folders to cater to the different programs, like it is with regular computers. All the data in your ExoBrain will be stored in the same bucket (just as it is with a human). And you will be able to get to any of it by referencing any one of a number of different reference points (just as a human does); things like the time of day, the people you were with, where you were located, etc.
Well, what you are looking at here is the fundamental difference between all of today’s computer programs, and the way that ExoTech has been set up. Our systems are based on the principal that any type of data can be related to any other type of data – regardless. Just like people do.
If you see another mountain scene years later, you may well recall the one you saw that I just mentioned, and it may be because the new scene also had the smell of pine trees, or you are with the same people, or the mountains look similar. It doesn’t matter, because you can match any type of data with any other type of data.
And that’s exactly how the ExoBrain works too!
So, ExoTechnology is not One-to-Many, it is Any-to-Any, and that makes a difference that no-one else can match, because all of the existing technology is based on the One-to-Many system and cannot be changed. We are the only ones who have an Any-to-Any system.
Neil Clark graduated from Gordon Institute of Technology, Geelong, Australia, as an Electrical Engineer. One of his first jobs was redesigning the entire electrical control system for the Fuel Recharging process at the Hunterston Nuclear Power Station in Scotland in the early 1960s.
Neil worked with IBM Australia from 1973 to 1992 where he was the Product Manager for the IBM PC through the 1980s. He took an early retirement package and then started his own business offering database development services for small businesses.
He has worked selling, marketing and as a product manager in the computer industry, so has a wide gamut of knowledge that he brings to his position in ExoTech Ltd, as well as being a published author.