
Chapter 1 Introducing Business Metadata
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1.2.1 In the Beginning
In the beginning were early forms of storage and technology. There were paper
tape and punched cards. These early storage media operated on the basis of
punches (chads) made in paper, which represented text or numbers. The lan-
guages that operated on these early forms of storage were assembler, COBOL,
and Fortran (see Figure 1.1). The storage media was good for small amounts of
data to be used in a short amount of time. But when a lot of data appeared or
when the data had to be used over a long period of time, these storage media
were not adequate.
Soon magnetic tape appeared and ...